IAF plane with two ministers to perform mock emergency landing on national highway

Union ministers Rajnath Singh and Nitin Gadkari will be onboard an Indian Air Force plane which will use the national highway in Rajasthan's Barmer to make a mock emergency landing this week.

The ministers will formally inaugurate the 3.5-km-long airstrip, which is the first one on a National Highway in the country. Two such airstrips on national highways have been completed in Andhra Pradesh and two more are under development, one in West Bengal and J&K, sources told TOI.

Originally, only 28 national highway stretches were identified for development as airstrips. Sources told TOI that experts are visiting different spots to assess the ground situation.


The airstrips are being planned around the international borders in states including J&K, Punjab, Gujarat and West Bengal.

The road transport and highways ministry had announced the setting up of an inter-ministerial joint committee in 2016 with the defence ministry and the IAF to look into the feasibility of setting up airstrips. Currently, only one such strip is operational on the Lucknow-Agra expressway in Uttar Pradesh.

Several countries, including Germany, Sweden, South Korea, Taiwan, Finland, Switzerland and Singapore have dedicated stretches of their highways and expressways to aircrafts for landing and taking off in emergencies.

(With inputs from TOI)