The City will have a aero museum if all goes as per plan of the State Tourism department and the directorate of the Jakkur Airfield (owned by the State government).
The museum, which will be a first of its kind in the country, will trace the history of aviation with models of aeroplanes and give a boost to Bangalore’s reputation as India’s aviation hub.
It will also serve the purpose of preventing the prime real estate from falling into the hands of the land mafia, which has been eyeing the airfield for quite some. The issue of protecting the aerodrome had come up in the Legislative Council in the last session.
Adding innovation to the museum will be a Boeing/Airbus plane that will be converted into an audio-visual (AV) room for imparting knowledge on aviation to visitors. The single-storey museum will come up on the North West corner of the 200-acre campus, showcasing the growth of aviation in the City since 1939.
The AV room will treat citizens to an extravaganza of short films on the Wright Brothers’ journey to their invention of the flying machine and other aviation wonders. The Jakkur aerodrome directorate is likely to approach Air India to provide one of the out-of-commission aircrafts for ‘re-developing’ it into an AV theatre.
There will also be two fixed-wing simulators which the aerodrome owns, the Cessna 172 and the Cessna 152 planes. The simulators will allow tourists to have a feel of a real flight, which will hopefully translate into actual flying lessons to be given by the flying school inside the aerodrome.
According to sources, the Rs 30-crore museum proposal has already been vetted by the additional chief secretary to the tourism department and the principal secretary to the youth services department.
Ready for execution
It is said that the project will be ready for execution in the next one month. Private firm Darashaw and Company Pvt Ltd has been assigned the task of drawing a master plan, sources said.
Arvind Jadhav, additional chief secretary (Tourism), confirmed the museum plan to Deccan Herald.
“There has been a proposal to construct an aero interpretation museum in Jakkur aerodrome. The Tourism department is only acting as a facilitator and the department concerned will be in charge of executing the project,” Jadhav said.