The State government will soon finalise a financial bid to bring in Embraer aircraft which will operate direct flights from Shillong to Delhi six days a week.
This was informed by Chief Minister Conrad Sangma during a tourism conclave held at the State Convention Centre here today. Sangma said that the tenders have been completed for this, and the process will soon be finalised.
“It is close to happening, the financial bid is open and we are now taking a final call and maybe towards the end of the month we will be able to come out with the final result,” Sangma said.
Since the Umroi Airport cannot land bigger planes, hence the government has looked for smaller jet flights.
Embraer aircraft is a 72-seater jet plane and will take approximately two hours and 30 minutes for a Shillong-Delhi flight, which is the same time for the A320 plane to reach from Guwahati to Delhi.
Sangma admitted that introducing Embraer flight would have a financial impact on the State government as it would have to put a financial viability gap funding.
“But again, we are open to the idea because we are very sure that once we have direct flights at least to Delhi first, six days a week, with a jet flight, it will be a game changer. This is what we feel,” he said.
Sangma also said that the government wants the same airline to operate flights of at least two to three days a week from Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad to Umroi Airport.
Stating that the government is working to get the Umroi Airport functional so that normal airlines like Indigo, Air India Express and others can operate flights at Umroi Airport directly, Sangma acknowledged that the airlines have a problem with the instrument landing system (ILS) and not the runway.
“It is not the problem with the runway. If that was the case we would have spent our own money and built the runway. If we can chop off the mountain for Rs 100 crore, I don’t think we would have had a problem in building this runway. The problem is that when aircrafts land and take off they need laser guided instrument landing systems and that requires close to 7 km of clear visibility and no obstruction beyond four hundred to four hundred feet, all the way to seven kilometers. Hence, right now the issue is the instrument landing system,” Sangma explained.
He also said that there is also a big mountain near the airport at about the sixth kilometre and it would require close to Rs 7000 to clear the mountain and build the runway. According to him, the government cannot afford to spend such a huge amount of money.
However, he said that the government is now looking at the process of studying the feasibility of landing big planes with the new equipment and new technology that is there now in the instrument landing system since the present one is a decade old.
“We are hopeful that with the new study it will give us an alternative to figure out how we can land larger planes and that is a process that is continuing,” Sangma said.
