Palungtar Airport also known as Gorkha Airport, was an

airport An airport is an aerodrome with extended facilities, mostly for commercial Aviation, air transport. They usually consist of a landing area, which comprises an aerially accessible open space including at least one operationally active surf ...

serving the

municipalities A municipality is usually a single administrative division having municipal corporation, corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality' ...

Palungtar and

Gorkha The Gurkhas or Gorkhas (), with the endonym Gorkhali ( Nepali: गोर्खाली ), are soldiers native to the Indian subcontinent, chiefly residing within Nepal and some parts of North India. The Gurkha units consist of Nepali and ...

Gorkha District Gorkha District (), a part of Gandaki Province, is one of seventy-seven districts of Nepal, and the fourth largest district of the country in terms of area. It is historically linked with the creation of modern Nepal and the name of the legenda ...

in the Southern region of

Gandaki Province Gandaki Province ( ) ), is one of the seven federal provinces established by the current constitution of Nepal which was promulgated on 20 September 2015. Pokhara is the province's capital city. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region in Southw ...

Nepal Nepal, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, is a landlocked country in South Asia. It is mainly situated in the Himalayas, but also includes parts of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It borders the Tibet Autonomous Region of China Ch ...

History

The airport was originally opened in October 1960. It is currently out of operation, for which the District of Gorkha has no active airport as of 2018. It used to serve as a main tourist gateway to the former royal city of Gorkha and its palaces, but lost importance after the area received road connectivity, namely Prithivi Highway. Despite being out of operation, the airport served as a major landing site for helicopters distributing relief material after the Gorkha earthquake in 2015.

Facilities

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 had one grass/clay runway which is in length.

Former airlines and destinations

Until 1979,

Nepal Airlines Nepal Airlines Corporation (), formerly known as Royal Nepal Airlines (), is the flag carrier of Nepal. Founded in 1958, it is the oldest airline of the country. Out of its main base at Tribhuvan International Airport, Kathmandu, the airline ope ...

operated several routes from the airport.

References

{{authority control Defunct airports in Nepal Buildings and structures in Gorkha District Airports established in 1960 1960 establishments in Nepal