Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru

Kempegowda International Airport Bengaluru is India's third-busiest airport after Delhi (DEL) and Mumbai (BOM), and the principal air gateway to the country's IT and aerospace capital. Located 25 mi (40 km) north of downtown Bengaluru at 3,000 ft (914 m) elevation — the highest of India's major commercial hubs — it handles 168 routes across 106 destinations through 40 airlines and recorded over 41M passengers in 2024, a figure that has roughly tripled since the airport opened on its greenfield site in May 2008 to replace the former city-center HAL airport. IndiGo operates BLR as one of its three largest bases, with Air India, Akasa Air, SpiceJet, and Star Air maintaining significant presences. International service is unusually strong for a non-capital Indian airport: Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, British Airways, KLM, Air France, Swiss, Turkish Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Thai Airways, and Malaysia Airlines operate daily widebody flights, and the airport has emerged as a secondary gateway to North America via nonstop service to San Francisco (Air India) and connecting traffic to Seattle, Washington–Dulles, and New York–JFK. The dense Gulf-route portfolio — Dubai, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Kuwait, Muscat, Jeddah, Riyadh, Dammam — reflects Bengaluru's role as a source city for South Asian labor migration into the GCC states. Two parallel 13,123 ft (4,000 m) asphalt runways (09L/27R and 09R/27L) enable independent simultaneous operations, and the airport operates two terminals: T1 (2008, renovated 2022) for domestic and select international, and T2 (2022), an internationally award-winning "Terminal in a Garden" design by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) featuring bamboo-clad architecture, vertical landscaping, and interior forest installations that have made it one of the most-photographed airport terminals of the 2020s. A direct suburban rail link from KR Puram to the airport is under construction, and BLR's master plan projects a 100M annual passenger capacity by 2040 across three runways and four terminals.