SIALKOT IS PREPARING FOR take-off

As more Pakistanis are able to afford to fly, Air Sial's founders hope to make their home city one of the major hubs of aviation in the country

- Farooq Tirmizi and Ariba Shahid

Here is a fact you may not know: there are four cities in Pakistan from which you can catch a regular direct flight to London Heathrow Airport: Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, and Sialkot. You probably guessed the first three. It is possible you may not have known about the fourth.

Sialkot, in the imagination of the rest of Pakistan, is the enterprising city known as the birthplace of Iqbal, the home of Pakistan’s sporting goods manufacturing industry, and the city whose business community – in an extraordinary act of self-reliance – got together and made their own airport, the first and only privately owned airport in the country. What is perhaps less well understood is just how well that airport is doing, and just how much Sialkotis love to travel – or need to travel for work.

The speed and scale of success of aviation in Sialkot is breathtaking. It is – by far – the fastest growing airport in Pakistan, with international air traffic growing at 62.7% per year for the past 11 years, according to data from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). But the numbers alone do not illustrate just how fast things have changed in the city.

In 2006, there was no airport in Sialkot at all. If you lived in Sialkot, you had to drive or take the bus to Lahore to then catch a flight to wherever else you were going. Now, in 2020, Sialkot is the fourth most connected airport in the country. Here is a list of global cities that you can catch a direct, non-stop flight to from Sialkot every week: Dubai, Sharjah, Doha, Muscat, Riyadh, Dammam, Manama, Kuwait, London, Milan, and Barcelona. And the flight to Paris has just one stopover, in Barcelona.