Still Says BOM

Mumbai's oldest terminal stops flying on October 25 for four years. Everyone still calls it Santacruz, and the bag tags still say Bombay.

As of October 25, Terminal 1 at Mumbai's airport stops handling flights. It's closing for about four years: demolition starts in January, the new terminal is due in 2029-30, and the airlines move across to Terminal 2 or out to the new airport in Navi Mumbai (Business Today has the details). T1 moved nearly 15 million passengers last year. The closure was meant to happen in 2025 and got pushed back because the airlines had nowhere else to go. Mumbai first proposed a second airport in November 1997. Navi Mumbai opened on Christmas Day 2025. The old terminal waited 28 years for permission to close.

Nobody in Mumbai calls it Terminal 1, though. They call it Santacruz, after the neighbourhood. The airfield started as RAF Santa Cruz, home to Royal Air Force squadrons from 1942 until Independence, and the reports put the T1 complex at about 84 years old. When the international terminal opened at Sahar in 1980, the old one went domestic and got a number. It never took.

The official names kept moving anyway. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995. Sahar Airport became Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in 1999, and got "Maharaj" added in 2018. The terminal itself was split into 1A, 1B and 1C, then 1A closed and the other two were renamed plain Terminal 1 in 2017.

The three letters never moved. Mumbai's airport code is still BOM. Chennai is still MAA, for Madras, and Kolkata is still CCU, for Calcutta. Navi Mumbai, the airport that took 28 years, got NMI. For the next four years Santacruz will be a building site that everyone keeps calling Santacruz, and the tag on your suitcase will keep saying Bombay.