Three hill districts in Himachal Pradesh — long cut off from quick air access — are now squarely in the state government's crosshairs for new flight services, with the Chief Minister's Office of Himachal Pradesh announcing that talks are underway to launch air connectivity to Hamirpur, Chamba, and Palampur within the next three to four months.

Kangra Airport as the Anchor Hub

The strategic centrepiece of the plan is Kangra Airport — also known as Gaggal Airport — which the CMO confirmed will be designated as the hub once aircraft movement begins across the new routes. Kangra has historically been Himachal Pradesh's most operationally active commercial airport, and successive upgrade rounds have strengthened its case as the regional nerve centre for a hub-and-spoke network.

That hub-and-spoke logic is not new to Himalayan aviation policy. States like Uttarakhand and those in India's Northeast have pursued identical frameworks — anchoring a primary airport and radiating routes outward to remote districts where terrain makes road travel slow, expensive, or seasonally impossible. For Himachal, the stakes are especially high: Chamba in particular remains one of the more isolated districts in the state, with road access frequently disrupted by landslides.

UDAN's Role in Unlocking Remote Routes

The broader enabling architecture for these routes is the central government's UDAN (Ude Desh ka Aam Naagrik) scheme, launched in 2016 to subsidise flight operations on underserved and unserved routes across India. Several Himachal Pradesh locations — including Kangra — were identified in successive UDAN bidding rounds for viability gap funding, which makes otherwise commercially unviable hill routes financially feasible for airlines.

Without that subsidy backbone, carriers have little incentive to operate thin-frequency routes to small airports. With it, the model has shown it can work — and the CMO's framing of Kangra as a hub suggests the state is ready to build upward from that foundation.

What the TFR Window Means

The reference to a pending TFR (Technical Feasibility Report) is the critical gating factor. Until that report clears, no formal expansion process moves. The CMO's statement signals confidence that the report will arrive soon and that the three-to-four-month conversation window for Hamirpur, Chamba, and Palampur is being treated as live, not aspirational. For residents and the tourism sector in these districts, the difference between a conversation and an operational schedule is the document now in transit.

Himachal's terrain is both its greatest draw and its hardest constraint — the same mountains that fill hotels make overland logistics punishing. Getting air connectivity to even a handful of additional districts would compress travel times dramatically, open new tourism corridors, and strengthen emergency medical access. The next few months will test whether the timeline holds.