Making short haul air trips in India seamless and attractive: Integration of alternative transport technologies to improve airport connectivity

Air transportation is attractive because of time saving and its role has been increasingly becoming necessitated by deregulation, privatisation and globalisation. It is common in short haul routes that the ratio of airtime to total journey time to accomplish the travel is very small and adverse to have attraction. The access and egress to and from airport facilities is extremely important. The need to improve connectivity in terms of capacity\ud and rapidity to existing and new airports with alternative urban transport technologies like Metro Rail, Light Rail, and Monorail has been emphasised in this paper considering\ud the rapid expansion of civil aviation, starting of operations by new airlines in India and air travel is becoming a need as against luxury in the past. The sharp increase in air travel in India over the last two years indicates that the future growth in air traffic will be\ud fuelled by feeder air sector, as the hinterland opens up industry, service and tourism. To derive fully the advantages of short haul air transportation, the integration of transport systems with necessary logistics feeding each transport modes is necessary to perform a\ud seamless journey. This paper aims at addressing these issues also and generates an argument for the need of planning urban transport technologies in a complimentary role for the growth of short haul air routes in India. It is very important to consider at the conceptual stage, the integration of urban transport/traffic management schemes. Such established schemes will make short haul air trips in India seamless and attractive which in turn will help for further growth of civil aviation, thereby enabling India's economic development. Further, issues such as perspectives in city planning and traffic management systems, maintenance-repair-overhaul services of air fleet, Air traffic management infrastructure and human resource development, which also play a catalytic role and prudent to the success of short haul air transport are highlighted in this paper