Car Nicobar Air Force Base is located in IAF Camp village, on

Car Nicobar Car Nicobar ( in Car language) is the northernmost of the Nicobar Islands. It is also one of three local administrative divisions of the Indian district of Nicobar, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Annual ra ...

Island in the Union territory of the

Andaman and Nicobar Islands The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a union territory of India consisting of 572 islands, of which 37 are inhabited, at the junction of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The territory is about north of Aceh in Indonesia and separated f ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

History

The 37 Wing Air Force Station at Car Nicobar has an area of . The bitumen runway was built by the Japanese during their occupation of these islands between 1942 and 1945. After 1945, it was used by the British Royal Air Force as a refuelling base for regular (generally twice-weekly) flights between RAF Negombo (now

Colombo International Airport Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) ( si, බණ්ඩාරනායක ජාත්‍යන්තර ගුවන්තොටුපළ, translit=Bandāranāyaka Jātyantara Guvantoṭupaḷa; ta, பண்டாரநாயக்க � ...

) in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and RAF Changi in Singapore (& vice versa), with an additional stop in RAF Butterworth, on the Malayan peninsula (opposite Penang). These flights were generally operated by

Vickers Valetta The Vickers Valetta is a twin-engine military transport aircraft developed and produced by the British manufacturing company Vickers-Armstrongs Ltd. Developed from the Vickers VC.1 Viking compact civil airliner, it was an all-metal mid-wing m ...

twin-prop aircraft. The runway was extended to by the

Indian Air Force The Indian Air Force (IAF) is the air arm of the Indian Armed Forces. Its complement of personnel and aircraft assets ranks third amongst the air forces of the world. Its primary mission is to secure Indian airspace and to conduct aerial w ...

(IAF) in 1967. The first Mi-8 helicopter arrived here in 1982. Besides the No. 122 Helicopter Flight, IAF of

Mi-8 The Mil Mi-8 (russian: Ми-8, NATO reporting name: Hip) is a medium twin-turbine helicopter, originally designed by the Soviet Union in the 1960s and introduced into the Soviet Air Force in 1968. It is now produced by Russia. In addition t ...

helicopters, Dorniers and an Air Defence unit are based here. The airstrip was brought into operation by the IAF by raising Staging Post in the year 1956, with its role as refuelling station for all aircraft flying across the Bay of Bengal. The Helicopter Flight was later inducted on 1 April 1985. The Base was upgraded to Forward Base Support Units (FBSU) on 23 August 1986 and subsequently as a Wing on 15 September 1993. The air base was devastated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, when 116 IAF officers and men, and wives and children, died. Little remained of the air base, which was established as India's southernmost defence post. IAF personnel worked night and day: the runway was repaired, navigational aids and the basic infrastructure were put back in place. On 14 April, just three-and-a-half months later, the Car Nicobar Air Base resumed operations.

Structure

The airport resides at an

elevation The elevation of a geographic location is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most commonly a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface (see Geodetic datum § Vert ...

of above

mean sea level There are several kinds of mean in mathematics, especially in statistics. Each mean serves to summarize a given group of data, often to better understand the overall value (magnitude and sign) of a given data set. For a data set, the '' ari ...

. It has one

runway According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a runway is a "defined rectangular area on a land aerodrome prepared for the landing and takeoff of aircraft". Runways may be a man-made surface (often asphalt concrete, as ...

designated 02/20 with a

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of fine and coarse aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement (cement paste) that hardens (cures) over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most wid ...

surface measuring .

Commercial services

The Andaman & Nicobar Islands Administration operates biweekly flights between

Port Blair Port Blair () is the capital city of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a union territory of India in the Bay of Bengal. It is also the local administrative sub-division (''tehsil'') of the islands, the headquarters for the district of South An ...

and Campbell Bay via Car Nicobar with 10 seater D228 aircraft chartered from

. There's also regular helicopter service by

Pawan Hans Pawan Hans Limited is a central public sector undertaking based at Noida in Delhi NCR, India. It is under the ownership of Ministry of Civil Aviation, Government of India. It has cumulatively flown more than 1 million hours and has had ...

between Car Nicobar, Port Blair and various Islands of Nicobar district.

References

Carnicobar (Iaf) Code: VOCX* IATA Code: CBD Lat,Lon: 9.1525,92.8196 State: India Elevation: 5 City: Iaf Camp FIR: VOMF Schedule: No Airports in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Indian Air Force bases World War II sites in India 1940s establishments in India Military airbases established in the 1940s 20th-century architecture in India {{India-airport-stub