A view of the new integrated terminal at Vijayawada airport in Gannavaram, which is scheduled to be completed by March 31, 2026.
| Photo Credit: G.N. RAO
After much delay, work on the new integrated terminal coming up at the Vijayawada International Airport in Gannavaram seems to have picked up pace, to meet the new deadline of March 31, 2026.
While Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu had initially set the completion target at June, 2025, the deadline was later pushed to December and now to March, 2026. Commissioning of the new terminal, however, will take two more months, according to the airport authorities.
Over hundred workers are engaged in building the terminal, the foundation stone for which was laid in 2018. Since then, work had seen many hiccups, including the pandemic, which delayed its progress.
Currently, over 80% of the terminal has been completed, including the glass work, interiors, flooring and baggage strip, the airport authorities said. Once opened to the public in June-July, all airport operations would be shifted to the new terminal, which can accommodate 3.5 million passengers per annum, will have both domestic and international facilities under one roof and will have better facilities than the existing one, including more escalators and more inline baggage system.
The existing terminal has two different terminals for domestic and international flights and has a passenger handling capacity of 2.03 million passengers per annum (MPPA).
According to the airport authorities, the new terminal, coming up at a cost of around ₹611 crore, will have 24 check-in counters and peak hour handling of 1,200 passengers (800 domestic and 400 international), which is slightly below the current handling capacity of 1,272 passengers, including 972 domestic and 300 international passengers.
However, the new terminal will have 8 immigration/custom counters, 6 departure gates, of which 3 are remote. Two of the remote departure gates are for domestic flights and one for international. It will also have enough space to accommodate 648 vehicles in the parking slot.
Notably, the new terminal will have six aerobridges, which will obliviate the need for passengers to be ferried from the terminal to the runway. The area of the new terminal building is 36,075 sq.m. Right now, the passengers are transported to the runway on a bus.
In accordance with the Chief Minister’s instructions, the new terminal building will have the themes of Amaravati Buddhist stupas and Kuchipudi dance. According to the airport authorities, there will be six figures of Kuchipudi dancers near arrival and departure gates and passenger boarding bridge nodes; there will be an Amaravati stupa near the airside facade.
It may be noted that currently, the Vijayawada International Airport is connected to Bengaluru, Kadapa, Hyderabad, Chennai, Tirupati, Visakhapatnam, Mumbai, Delhi and Kurnool.
Published – December 14, 2025 08:18 pm IST
