Car Nicobar Air Force Station 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 Among the states and union territories of India, a Union Territory (UT) is a region that is directly governed by the Government of India, central government of India, as opposed to the states, which have their own State governments of India, s ...

of the

Andaman and Nicobar Islands The Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a union territory of India comprising 572 islands, of which only 38 are inhabited. The islands are grouped into two main clusters: the northern Andaman Islands and the southern Nicobar Islands, separated by a ...

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

History

The 37 Wing Air Force Station at Car Nicobar has an area of . The

bitumen Bitumen ( , ) is an immensely viscosity, viscous constituent of petroleum. Depending on its exact composition, it can be a sticky, black liquid or an apparently solid mass that behaves as a liquid over very large time scales. In American Engl ...

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) (commonly known as Colombo International Airport, Colombo–Bandaranaike International Airport, and locally as Katunayake International Airport) (IATA airport code, IATA: CMB, ICAO airport code, ICAO: VC ...

) 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 ...

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

Indian Air Force The Indian Air Force (IAF) (ISO 15919, ISO: ) is the air force, air arm of the Indian Armed Forces. Its primary mission is to secure Indian airspace and to conduct aerial warfare during armed conflicts. It was officially established on 8 Octob ...

(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 (, NATO reporting name: Hip) is a medium twin-turbine helicopter, originally designed by the Soviet Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute (TsAGI) in the 1960s and introduced into the Soviet Air Force in 1968. Russian production of t ...

helicopters, Dorniers and an Air Defence unit are based here. The airstrip was brought into operation by the IAF by raising a staging post in the year 1956, with its role as a 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 station was devastated by the

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami On 26 December 2004, at 07:58:53 local time ( UTC+7), a major earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2–9.3 struck with an epicentre off the west coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. The undersea megathrust earthquake, known in the sci ...

, 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 Station resumed operations.

Structure

The airport resides at an

elevation The elevation of a geographic location (geography), ''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 equipotenti ...

of above

mean sea level A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statist ...

. It has one

runway In aviation, a runway is an elongated, rectangular surface designed for the landing and takeoff of an aircraft. Runways may be a human-made surface (often asphalt concrete, asphalt, concrete, or a mixture of both) or a natural surface (sod, ...

designated 02/20 with a

concrete Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bound together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. It is the second-most-used substance (after water), the most–widely used building material, and the most-manufactur ...

surface measuring .

Commercial services

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Administration operates biweekly flights every Monday and Friday between

Port Blair Port Blair (), officially named Sri Vijaya Puram, 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 headqu ...

and Campbell Bay via Car Nicobar with 10 seater D228 aircraft chartered from the Indian Air Force. There is also a regular helicopter service by

Pawan Hans Pawan Hans Limited (PHL) is a transport service operated as a central public sector undertaking based at Noida in Delhi NCR, India. It is a Mini Ratna-I category PSU under the ownership of Ministry of Civil Aviation of the Government of I ...

between Car Nicobar,

and the various islands of

Nicobar district Nicobar district is one of three districts in the Indian union territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The district's administrative territory encompasses all of the Nicobar Islands, which are located in the Indian Ocean, between the Bay ...

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 {{Indian Air Force Airports in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands World War II sites in India 1940s establishments in India Military airbases established in the 1940s 20th-century architecture in India