Rudy (62), who served as the civil aviation minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 2003-04, was in Rajkot to address a press conference about the Union Budget.

A licensed commercial pilot, Rudy flew a scheduled commercial flight of an airline from Delhi to Ahmedabad on Friday night as a pilot and then drove to Rajkot overnight. He is scheduled to return to Delhi by flying another scheduled commercial flight.

“It is possible that when the international airport was announced, there was no shortage of aircraft in the country. After the war broke out between Russia and Ukraine, the number of airworthy aircraft has fallen in India because a lot of engines have developed fault… Airlines don’t have sufficient aircraft and this could be due to this service issue with engines,” Rudy told mediapersons when asked about RIA.

He added that having the term “international” in the nomenclature of an airport doesn’t necessarily make an airport international and cited the example of the Patna airport. “For example, Patna (airport’s name) is Jayprakash Narayan International Airport. No international flight has taken off from there in the last 70 years. In my understanding, an airport doesn’t become an international airport by merely declaring it as one,” he added.

Rudy further said that post the de-control of flight operations in the country following disinvestment of Air India by the Union government, airlines operate domestic and international flights as per demand and supply forces and that the government is no longer operating any flights as “social service”.

Rudy, himself a licensed commercial pilot, said that Russia controls 80 per cent of the global supply of titanium, a metal which is used in manufacturing aircraft engines and other body parts, but the Russia-Ukraine war has disrupted this supply line as the West has imposed sanctions on Russia. This, he said, has adversely affected European countries manufacturing aircraft engines and that it has a spillover effect on Indian airlines.

The BJP leader said that presently, Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad are the major hubs handling international flights while the rest of the airports in the country more or less act as spokes to these hubs. “Frist, the focus is to create the hub and spokes and in next generation, a spokes becomes a hub,” he added.

The RIA has come up at Hirasar village, around 30 km east of Rajkot, at a cost of Rs 1,405 crore. The Rajkot Airport, which was located in the middle of the city, had shifted its operations to RIA on September 10, 2023. While local officials of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) had then said that international flights would start by April 2024, Gujarat BJP vice-president Bharat Boghra had posted a video on social media stating that RIA will start handling international flights from March 2024.However, RIA’s terminal building is still under construction and the airport presently handles an average 10 domestic flights daily.

On July 11, the AAI had said that while the terminal building was expected to be ready within a few weeks, no airline had submitted any proposal to launch international flights from RIA. Amid protests by Congress, AAI had said on July 13 that airlines were likely to start international flights from RIA from October.