Departure
96%
vs 95%
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (VABB/BOM) is Mumbai's principal gateway, a major international hub sited across the suburbs of Santacruz and Sahar in the north of the city. For the simulator pilot it offers two crossing hard-surfaced runways, full ILS coverage on three approach directions, and the challenge of operating into one of Asia's busiest and most congested terminal areas.
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport serves the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and is operated by Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), a joint venture of Adani Enterprises and the Airports Authority of India. It is named after Shivaji, the seventeenth-century Chhatrapati of the Maratha Empire, and sits in the suburbs of Santacruz and Sahar Village in Vile Parle East. For a visiting sim pilot it is a busy, high-workload international hub with two intersecting runways, dense mixed traffic, and a full set of instrument approaches, making it a rewarding destination for anyone practising airline-style operations into a major Indian airport.
The airport lies within controlled airspace under Mumbai Approach and Mumbai Area Control, reflecting its status as a major international hub. It is located across the Santacruz and Sahar districts of Mumbai, in Vile Parle East, within the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
The field has two physical runways. Runway 09/27 is a hard-surfaced, lit runway with ILS serving both directions, measuring 10,830 feet on runway 09 and 9,712 feet on runway 27. Runway 14/32 is also hard-surfaced and lit, with ILS on runway 14; it measures 8,101 feet on 14 and 8,761 feet on runway 32. Field elevation is 23 feet.
Mumbai Area Control operates on 120.5 MHz. Mumbai Approach works on 127.9 MHz, with ATIS broadcast on 126.4 MHz. Clearance delivery is provided on 121.85 MHz and ground movement on 121.9 MHz. Mumbai Tower operates on 118.1 MHz, with a radar frequency of 119.3 MHz also published, and a radio facility listed on 1008.4 MHz. The airport is equipped with ILS approaches, available on runways 09, 27 and 14.
The airfield began life as RAF Santa Cruz, constructed in the 1930s, and was a larger facility than the nearby Juhu Aerodrome. It housed several Royal Air Force squadrons during the Second World War from 1942 until 1947. The site originally covered around 1,500 acres and had three runways, with an apron on the south side of what is now runway 09/27; that area, still known as the Old Airport, today houses maintenance hangars for Air India and other operators. By 1946 the RAF began handing the airfield to India's Director General of Civil Aviation for civil use, and two former RAF hangars were converted into passenger terminals, one for domestic and one for international traffic, with Air India running its own adjoining terminal. Traffic grew rapidly after the partition of Karachi to Pakistan, reaching around forty daily services by 1949, prompting the installation of a night landing system with a radio range and modernised flare path lighting. A new passenger terminal and apron, begun in 1950, opened in 1958 and was run first by the Public Works Department and later by the Ministry of Civil Aviation. Rising jet-age traffic through the 1970s left the Santacruz terminal, designed for 600 passengers at a time, handling 1,200 by the late 1970s, prompting Time magazine to describe the congested terminal building as a black hole. A fire gutted the international section of the terminal on 21 September 1979, killing three passengers and closing the airport temporarily, after which a stopgap departure extension known as the Gulf Terminal was brought into use. Recommendations from a 1967 committee led to construction of a new international terminal at Sahar, northeast of Santacruz in Vile Parle, beginning in November 1977. The airport was renamed from Sahar Airport to Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in 1999, with the honorific Maharaj added to the name on 30 August 2018.
The airport is today a major international hub, serving as a base for Air India, Blue Dart Aviation and FedEx Express, and as an operating base for Air India Express, Akasa Air and IndiGo. It is owned by the Airports Authority of India and operated by Mumbai International Airport Limited, a joint venture in which Adani Enterprises holds a seventy-four percent stake and the Airports Authority of India the remaining twenty-six percent. The airport has two main passenger terminals handling both domestic and international services.