PUNE, 12 December 2005 — With just a day to go for the city’s first international flight to Dubai today, to be followed by another to Singapore tomorrow, decks have been cleared to grant international airport status to Pune airport.
All customs and immigration facilities have been readied, as also the roads leading to the airport have been cleared of all potholes.
Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel is delighted to please his party boss Sharad Pawar, the Maratha strongman, who is the president of the Nationalist Congress Party with the gift of inaugurating the first international flight to Dubai on his birthday.
Air-India will launch the first flight from here to Dubai direct and the other to Singapore via Hyderabad with an Airbus A320. All the seats to the two destinations are almost fully booked. The flight to Dubai will also have journalists and politicians as guests.
With Pune airport going interantional, the Haj committe has demanded that the government should start a direct flight to Jeddah from here so that pilgrims from the city as also from neighboring districts of Satara, Sangli, Solapur, Kolhapur and Ahmednagar will find it easy to reach the holy places with ease.
According to Rashid Khan, the president of the Pune City Haj Committee, going to Bombay, staying there for three-four days and then catching a flight to Jeddah is hectic and the pilgrims especially the elderly, women and children, suffer a lot in all this process.
Khan said that more than 3,000 people form Pune travel for Haj every year.
