Jodhpur was already an international airport while Delhi was still learning how to be one. Maharaja Umaid Singh was born in 1903, the year the Wright brothers left the sand at Kitty Hawk, and he treated that coincidence as a brief. In 1924 he cleared a strip beside the rising Chittar Palace, later Umaid Bhawan, so that wood-and-string machines could land in Marwar without asking Calcutta or Karachi first. In November 1931 he opened the Jodhpur Flying Club, the first in a princely state. Geoffrey Goodwin came from Johannesburg to teach. The first two aircraft were DH.60 Moths bought from the Delhi Flying Club for Rs.10,896 each. A DH.60M Tiger Moth arrived from De Havilland at Karachi on 23 March 1932. The aerodrome itself cost Rs.1,36,830. Opening day mixed Rolls-Royces and Hispano-Suizas with English and Indian kitchens and Burma Shell fuel given free. Polo teams stayed for weeks. Court nobles were told to learn to fly. Not all of them loved the crates.
By the mid-1930s the club was no longer a toy. Imperial Airways and Indian Trans-Continental used Jodhpur as a staging point on the Karachi-Calcutta sector. Air Orient, then Air France, stopped on the long haul from Paris toward Saigon, Hanoi and Hong Kong. KLM put the desert on the Amsterdam-Batavia timetable. In 1937 the field handled 877 aircraft. Three foreign airlines called about twice a week. Passengers bound for Cairo, Rangoon and the Far East treated the Blue City as a known waypoint, not an adventure. Long-distance pioneers flying by compass, map and dead reckoning, Bert Hinkler, Jean Batten among them, came through. In 1933 the club supported the first flight over Everest. Umaid Singh held an A licence, took honorary Air Commodore and later Air Vice-Marshal rank, became a shareholder in India’s first airways, and built some 23 strips across the state. The story that survived in Mehrangarh is that he would drop unannounced from the sky to inspect them. The British eventually asked him to stop adding fields. He put the network at the RAF’s disposal when the war came, trading concrete for political leverage as the fighting moved toward Burma. He died in June 1947, weeks before Independence, having already placed Jodhpur on a world airway that the Republic had not yet invented.
After 1947 the same ground became an Indian Air Force station with a civil enclave glued to its edge. No. 2 Air Force Academy sat here from 1949 to 1955. The Air Force Flying College followed until 1970 with a pause around the 1965 war. Su-30MKIs, Mi-17s, HAL Dhruvs and later Prachands used the same runway that once hosted KLM. A Garud commando unit lives on the base. South Western Air Command treats the station as one of the most important fields in the west, about 250 kilometres from the Pakistan border. Civil flying never left, but it became a guest. Indian Airlines then Air India after the 2007–11 merger kept Delhi and Mumbai on the board so the city would not shrink back into a flying-club memory. The old civil terminal was small, 5,690 square metres, seven counters, three gates an apron that could hold two A320s or 737s and an ATR if the IAF allowed. Photography parking and surge days still follow base rules. Height around the field is governed by a colour-coded zoning map under GSR 751(E). The civil side cannot grow without a land swap with the Air Force. That swap, negotiated from 2017 and completed in stages through 2021, gave AAI about 37 acres. The IAF took municipal land in return. The dual-use bargain is the real constitution of Jodhpur aviation.
The numbers finally outgrew the old shed. In FY 2025–26 the airport handled 10,90,554 passengers, 7,770 movements and 192.9 tonnes of cargo, enough to rank it around 48th in India and to cross a million passengers in a year. IndiGo built the wider net Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Noida, Pune. Air India held the two trunk spokes that still carried a Maharaja code. In March and April 2026 the shared runway closed for about a month while the mid-section was resurfaced. Fourteen daily civil flights vanished. Fighter squadrons moved. Civil flying resumed at the end of April. The Su-30s came home later in May once the far end was finished. On 4 July 2026 Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a new 23,342-square-metre terminal, designed by STHAPATI, built for about Rs.480 crore dressed in multifoil arches and jharokhas, rated for two million passengers a year, six aerobridges, twenty counters. He used the same visit to launch a modified UDAN scheme. The architecture quotes Marwar. The airside still belongs to the IAF.
On 1 September 2026 the last Air India scheduled services to Delhi and Mumbai ended. Air India Express took the same city pairs with different metal and different rules. IX 1803 arrives from Mumbai around 12.55 and turns for Delhi. IX 1823 comes from Delhi around 17.05 and turns for Mumbai around 17.35. Bookings on the full-service codes closed. Express tickets opened. IndiGo remains the frequency machine. The new terminal is already the front door. The loss is not isolation. Jodhpur is better connected in raw seats than at any time since KLM left.