Air Force clears 12 NHs for aircraft landing

The Indian Air Force has given clearance to 12 national highways to be converted as emergency landing strips to its aircraft. They included Jamshedpur-Balasore highway and Chattarpur-Digha highway - both touching Odisha, the Kishanganj-Islampur highway in Bihar, Delhi-Moradabad highway in Delhi-Uttar Pradesh, Bijbehara-Chinar Bagh highway in Jammu and Kashmir, Rampur-Kathgodam highway in Uttarakhand, Lucknow-Varanasi highway in Uttar Pradesh, Dwarka-Maliya highway in Gujarat, Kharagpur-Keonjhar highway in West Bengal. In addition, Mohanbari-Tinsukia highway in Assam, Vijaywada-Rajahmundry highway in Andhra Pradesh, Chennai-Puducherry highway in Tamil Nadu, and Phalodi-Jaisalmer highway in Rajasthan have also been cleared, the chairman NHAI, Deepak Kumar said. The decision will not only provide the IAF much more strategic flexibility but more importantly, as per officials, enable emergency aids to be delivered quickly in remote areas in times of natural disaster. The project can be traced back to 2015 when the IAF landed its Mirage 2000 fighter jets at a stretch in the Yamuna Express Highway in Uttar Pradesh. Following this, Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari had announced setting up projects at specifications for converting additional highway stretches into landing strips.