Chennai International Airport
Facts on MAA
MAA is a fossil of the city's older name. Chennai was Madras — the British East India Company took a grant of coastal land there in 1639 and built Fort St. George — and the city was only officially renamed Chennai in 1996, long after its airport code had been fixed.
Source: Wikipedia
Chennai's own name honors a person, not just its old name Madras: it derives from Damarla Chennapa Nayaka, a 16th-century Nayaka chieftain and military commander (Dalavoy) who ruled the territories of Kalahasti and Vandavasi as a vassal of the Vijayanagara emperor Venkatapati Raya, and who died around 1580.
After Chennapa Nayaka's death, his son Damarla Ayyappa Nayaka granted land to the British East India Company in 1639 to found a trading post, naming the new settlement Chennapatnam ('City of Chennappa') in his father's honor; the first official use of the name was in an August 1639 sale deed to Francis Day. That settlement, shortened to Chennai, became the city's official name again in July 1996 when the Tamil Nadu government renamed Madras — and gave the airport its current title, Chennai International Airport.
Source: Wikipedia — Chennai
The city's flying story starts with a hotelier. In 1910 Giacomo D'Angelis, a Corsican who ran a hotel in Madras, built a small-engined biplane with the coach-builder Simpson's and flew it at the Island Grounds — recorded as the first powered flight in Asia.
Source: Wikipedia
On 15 October 1932 J. R. D. Tata flew a Puss Moth loaded with air mail from Karachi to Bombay's Juhu airstrip; the aviator Nevill Vintcent carried it on to Madras, and that leg became the first scheduled flight ever to land at the airport.
Source: Wikipedia
Chennai's secondary runway 12/30 crosses the Adyar river on a bridge carrying both runway and taxiway — the first international airport in India with a runway over a watercourse. The extension cost around 4,300 million rupees (US$45 million) and was completed in March 2011.
Source: Wikipedia
Building on the Adyar floodplain has a price. In December 2015 the northeast monsoon swamped the runways and terminals, closing the airport entirely from 1 to 6 December; about 1,500 passengers and 2,000 workers were evacuated and 30 to 35 aircraft were stranded on the apron.
Source: Wikipedia
The integrated Terminal 2, opened on 7 July 2023, is a piece of Tamil design argument: its exterior draws on the Dravidian architecture of Hindu temples, its roofline on the pleats of a Bharatanatyam dancer's sari, and its floors and ceilings on kolam patterns.
Source: Wikipedia
Outside that terminal stands a 1,730-kilogram Nachiarkoil lamp, a brass form made by hereditary craftsmen of the Tamil Nadu town of the same name — scaled up to airport size and used as the building's signature object.
Source: Wikipedia
Chennai does far more than handle its own flights: it is the centre of one of India's four flight information regions, directing traffic over five southern states, two union territories and oceanic airspace across parts of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
Source: Wikipedia
The old passenger terminal at Meenambakkam did not go to waste — it became the air cargo complex, commissioned on 1 February 1978 as India's second gateway cargo terminal after Kolkata. In 2024-25 the airport moved 0.37 million tonnes of freight.
Source: Wikipedia