As Kannur International airport opens, this father and son scripts history

Kannur, Dec 9: The Kannur International Airport (KIAL), the fourth in Kerala, was thrown open to public by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu on Sunday morning. Creating a record, two years ago, when a 228-Dornier aircraft of the Indian Air Force landed as the first trial flight at the Kannur International Airport, it was Raghunath Nambiar, a native of Kannur, who was in the cockpit that day. Today, his son Aswin Nambiar, 29, will pilot the first commercial flight of 'Go Air' to Kannur on Sunday. The flight took off from Delhi at 8.30 a.m. and landed at KIAL at 11.30 a.m, scripting the dawning of a new era in the history of Kannur.

Ashwin, who has been with GoAir for the past one-and-a-half years and has a total of 1,100 hours of flying time, has mostly operated from New Delhi and Kolkata airports. The only airport that he has flown to in Kerala was to Kochi. Ashwin's family, consisting of his grandmother, uncle and cousins, stay in Kadachira, 23 kms from the airport in Mattanur.

Meanwhile, an Air India Express flight with 180 passengers to Abu Dhabi became the first flight to be flagged off from the airport at 10 am. All passengers received a gift each from the airport authorities on the occasion.

Built on 2,000 acres of land near the town of Mattanur, the airport will be the fourth international airport in Kerala after Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode. It can serve one million passengers annually and the number is likely to rise five-fold by 2025.

The airport will be of huge benefit for the large emigrant Malayali population, native to the Kannur and Kasaragod districts, and working in the Gulf countries.

A video of the song was posted on YouTube by Kannur International Airport