Jamnagar’s runways are military first. The Indian Air Force came looking for a range in 1950, not a passenger terminal. Maharajpur, Bhopal, Amarda Road and Cholavaran were on the list. Jamnagar won because the salt pans and the Gulf of Kutch gave what a new air force needed after Partition. Air-to-ground work could live at Sarmat. Air-to-air work could live off the coastal strip of Jodhya and Balachandi, where a drogue could be towed over water and a miss would not land in a village. The Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Digvijaysinhji, gave land and cleared files. The station was inaugurated in 1951. The Armament Training Wing was raised on 1 April that year. No. 3 Squadron flew the first air-to-ground course in May. Wing Commander Padam Singh Gill took the first command. Sidney Basil Noronha followed. The ATW owned almost no fighters of its own, only a few Dakotas for towing. Squadrons rotated in, fired, and left. The staff were Pilot Attack Instructors, treated as the cream of the fighter force. That is the origin of the field that still sits under today’s civil enclave.
India had to import the first instructors. Four pilots went to Australia in 1950-52 for the Royal Australian Air Force Pilot Attack Instructors course. Others went to Britain. The plan was to stop paying for seats overseas and build a school at home. The PAI School opened at Jamnagar in 1956-57. George Douglas 'Nobby' Clarke, RAAF-trained in 1951, spent much of the next decade as instructor, flight commander and later chief instructor. The first Indian course graduated in April 1958. Twenty-four courses ran through 1970. Nearly two hundred pilots passed, among them three men who would become Chief of the Air Staff. Air-to-ground delivery was taught here. Air-to-air combat and fighter-leader tactics were still bought in the United Kingdom on Hunters until the 1965 war made that dependence look dangerous. An Operational Conversion Unit with Hunters formed in 1964. The PAI School closed in 1975. By then Jamnagar had already been used as a fighting base, not only a classroom. In December 1961, ATW launched Toofanis and Vampires against Diu during the Goa operation. In September 1965, PAF B-57s and Sabres put bombs into the military quarters on the night of the 12th and 13th. Training stations on the western rim discovered they were on the map.
The next layer was tactics, not gunnery. After 1965 the IAF built what became the Tactics and Air Combat Development Establishment. Under Wing Commander A. Sridharan the unit was renamed and moved to Jamnagar in 1972-73. The first Fighter Combat Leader course began in May 1973. Flight commanders already qualified as PAIs arrived from MiG and Sukhoi squadrons. Squadron Leader Anil Yashwant Tipnis, later Chief of the Air Staff in the Kargil year, took the first course trophy. TACDE stayed at Jamnagar for nearly three decades, writing 2-v-2 and 2-v-4 geometry, strike profiles and briefing notes that squadrons would carry to war. In February 1978 the Jam Saheb’s house gave TACDE the Sword of Jam Sataji, a local legend about judgment offered to a school whose job was judgment. On 22 April 1978 the Armament Training Wing itself became No. 33 Wing, an operational formation rather than a visiting classroom. The base still trains. The ranges still sit over Sarmat and the Gulf. The civil passenger does not see that syllabus. The runway length and the two-strip layout exist because fighters needed them first.
Civil flying was always the second user. Before the IAF station, Jamair, backed by the Jam Saheb after 1946, flew charters and scheduled sectors from the field until nationalisation and later years that faded by 1977. Indian Airlines and then Air India put Mumbai on the board because the city became a Reliance energy and refining hub and needed an industrial bridge, not because the apron was designed for an A320 bank. The Airports Authority of India manages a civil enclave of about 36 acres inside an IAF airfield. One terminal. Capacity of a hundred arriving and a hundred departing. Three check-in desks. One A320 bay and one ATR bay on the published sheet. Two runways, 06/24 and 12/30, both a little over 2,500 metres, the only dual-runway civil field in Gujarat and still IAF property. Photography, parking and surge days follow dual-use rules. When the Ambani pre-wedding charters arrived in 2024, the enclave handled movements by sending jets to sit at Rajkot, Porbandar, Ahmedabad and Mumbai because Jamnagar has almost no civil parking. In the year to March 2026 the enclave moved about 1,66,490 passengers. That is a city-and-refinery number, not a hub number. Air India is taking its name off the departure board. Air India Express inherits the Mumbai frequencies. IndiGo and Star Air already treat the field as a thin industrial spoke. The IAF keeps the runways. The flag carrier’s full-service cabin was never the reason the concrete was poured.
Passengers will feel the military grammar before they feel any airline brand. A civil slot at Jamnagar is permission to use someone else’s range. Crews brief on photography limits and on days when armament serials close a runway. Airlines plan payload against heat, salt air and a short civil apron. The heritage that matters here is not a maharaja’s flying club in the Jodhpur sense. It is a post-Independence decision to put India’s gunnery school on the Kutch coast and then to grow a tactics school on the same ground. Nearly two hundred attack instructors, three chiefs, a wing number and a combat-leader course all came out of that choice. Express can double a Mumbai frequency. It cannot change who owns the strip or why the second runway exists. Jamnagar remains what the IAF built in 1951. Civil aviation still flies as a guest on an armament field.