Old terminal

It was on October 15, 1932 that the first commercial airline service began in India. Tata Sons had created its Aviation Department in July that year and it was JRD Tata himself who flew the first mail service, from Karachi to Bombay, landing on a grass strip at Juhu. That's pretty common knowledge. What is lesser known is that Bombay was merely a wayside stop on the journey; the de Havilland Puss Moth JRD flew was scheduled to take the mail from Karachi (now in Pakistan), all the way to Madras. The second leg, Bombay to Madras via Bellary, was piloted by Neville Vincent, an ex-RAF pilot and probably the nucleus of Tata's aviation foray. So it was that Madras added another first to its record, even if it was at the tail end of the schedule.

But many years before that, Madras was ahead by quite a nose. Giacomo d'Angelis, the Messinian hotelier of Madras, made the first ever flight in Asia. That was on March 10, 1910, when he flew an airplane of his own design, with the engine built by E & A Levetus & Co and Simpsons. That first flight was at Pallavaram, quite close to where Chennai's airport is today. Much, much later, Madras was again at the tail, being the final destination of Air India's first flight, from Bombay via Belgaum, in 1954.

For all those early records, and its current status as India's third busiest airport (after Mumbai and Delhi), Chennai airport still has a rather old-world charm to it. Not for it the miles of moving around the terminal buildings or not knowing which gate your flight is at. All that might change once the current modernisation effort is complete; however, that effort will surely spare this original terminal building which is now being used as the cargo complex!