In 1924, Maharaja Umaid Singh created a Flying Department and began developing aerodromes at Jodhpur and Uttarlai. Within nine years, the state had built 15 landing grounds across Marwar. The Jodhpur Flying Club, founded in 1931, was the first of its kind in an Indian princely state.
The Maharaja’s project began with personal fascination, but it quickly became an instrument of government.
Jodhpur was a vast, dry state in which road journeys could be slow and difficult. Aircraft offered the ruler a way to defeat distance to reach outlying areas, connect officials, demonstrate technical modernity and make the state more visible to the colonial authorities who controlled much of India’s wider aviation framework.
Umaid Singh did not merely clear a strip for private flights. He spent Rs 1.36 lakh building a sophisticated aerodrome near Chittar Palace, now Umaid Bhawan Palace and added a satellite field at Uttarlai. He also created the administrative machinery around aviation, establishing the Flying Department to oversee construction and regulation.
By 1933, Jodhpur had something unusual for princely India an aviation network. The flying club made that network social as well as strategic. It trained royal-household members and state officials, introduced local people to flight and brought aircraft such as Gypsy Moths, Tiger Moths and Lockheed types into the desert city. Umaid Singh took flying lessons himself and earned an 'A' licence.
But the location mattered as much as the Maharaja’s enthusiasm. Jodhpur lay on the imperial air route across the subcontinent. By the late 1930s, Air France, KLM and Imperial Airways were using the city, which had become a stop on a long global journey between Europe and Australia. Aviation gave the state leverage. It was no longer only a territory on a railway map, but a place international aircraft needed to reach.
Then came war. When World War II began, the airfields built for royal mobility and civil aviation became useful to Allied logistics. The RAF took over Jodhpur aerodrome in 1942. The site became a training, maintenance and staging base, while American forces used it as a transit point for 'Hump' operations supplying China through the China-Burma-India.
The Jodhpur Flying Club was converted into a training centre for Indian cadets and later designated No. 2 Elementary Flying Training School. The facilities that had begun as a Maharaja’s modernising project became part of a much larger war machine.
That military inheritance still shapes Jodhpur’s civil aviation. The old airfield is divided between the Indian Air Force and the Airports Authority of India. Jodhpur’s civilian airport operates beside a major military station. Uttarlai, the other early field developed under Umaid Singh, is now an Indian Air Force fighter base.
The shared airport means civil aviation has limits that a purely commercial terminal might not. Airside access, aircraft movement, expansion options and operating priorities must coexist with military requirements. Jodhpur is the tourist gateway to Rajasthan, but it remains an airport built inside a strategic landscape. It has the new Terminal Building inaugurated by India's prime minister Narendra Modi.
The story is not simply that a ruler loved aircraft. Umaid Singh turned a royal interest into roads in the sky, landing grounds that connected a scattered desert state, an aerodrome that joined global routes and infrastructure that later served wartime needs. A century on, Jodhpur still flies through the legacy of that decision.