Vizag's air traffic to shift as PM Modi to open GMR's new Bhogapuram airport

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to inaugurate a new international airport at Bhogapuram in North Andhra Pradesh on August 1, the state government says, an opening that will end civilian flights at Visakhapatnam and move the city's entire commercial air traffic about 45 km to the GMR-built greenfield hub.

For all the state's framing of a landmark "gateway," the immediate consequence is a forced migration. Visakhapatnam's decades-old civil enclave, which shares the Navy's INS Dega airfield, will stop handling commercial flights, and carriers including Air India, IndiGo and Scoot will operate from Bhogapuram instead; Singapore's Scoot has said it will be first to shift, and Visakhapatnam's VTZ code will transfer to the new airport. The switch has drawn objections from civil-society groups that wanted domestic flights retained in the city. The stated rationale is capacity: the naval airfield's military schedules limited civilian slots, while Bhogapuram offers unrestricted 24/7 operations.

The airport, named the Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport, is being developed by GMR's GVIAL under a 40-year concession at about INR 4,725 crore, the civil aviation minister has said, up from an initial estimate near INR 2,200 crore. It has a 3.8-km runway billed as India's longest, wide-body capability, and is designed for 6 million passengers a year in Phase 1, expandable to 18 million.

Declared structurally complete on July 7, the airport is set to begin commercial flights around the inauguration, after an earlier July 8 launch was postponed; the opening has slipped several times over the past year.

PM Modi will also inaugurate a GMR Skill Development Centre, an Aviation Hub-University and the GMR-MANSAS Edu City at the site, the government said, without detailing their scale. The government has ordered a ten-day publicity drive and free flights for farmers who gave up land for the project, over past objections on rehabilitation.