Gandhinagar is a small airfield on the outskirts of Nashik in Maharashtra. For 25 years it was Nashik’s airport. Wikipedia records commercial services from 1972 to 1997: Indian Airlines, then the regional carrier Vayudoot, and finally Maharashtra-Span Air. None of them made it a busy airport, and the scheduled flights ended in 1997.

The army then took the field over to convert it into a military airbase, and Wikipedia now describes it as a full-fledged army aviation base, owned and operated by the Army Aviation Corps. That is unusual in India, where most military airfields, including Leh, belong to the Indian Air Force and army helicopters are guests. Nashik’s civil air service moved to Ozar, which also took over the city’s IATA code, ISK; Gandhinagar kept its ICAO code, VANR. Its single runway, 09/27, is 1,378 m of concrete at an elevation of 483 m, according to Wikipedia’s infobox; the Indian AIP could not be read for this page.

The Combat Army Aviation Training School was established at Nashik Road on 1 September 2003, 17 years after the corps itself. The corps traces its lineage to the Air Observation Post flights India inherited in 1947, when the RAF’s No. 659 Squadron was disbanded at Lahore and divided with Pakistan; it was formed as a separate corps on 1 November 1986, and on that day most of the air force’s Chetak helicopters were transferred to it. Its pilots are army officers, and its squadrons, each generally of two flights, work directly for army formations.

The school’s equipment reflects that history. The most widely reported piece is a Cheetah simulator, completed in 2005 at a cost of 16.26 crore rupees, which Wikipedia says is designed to expose the trainee to different weather conditions such as snow, rain and storm, the conditions army pilots meet in the Himalayas. The Cheetah, a licence-built Lama first assembled in India in 1972, has been the corps’s high-altitude workhorse; a re-engined Cheetal set a world landing record at 7,070 m in 2004. The Dhruv, which the army had wanted precisely for Siachen and Kashmir, was cleared for the Siachen sector in its Mk.3 form in September 2007. Which helicopters the school flies today was not confirmed in the sources checked.

Abhilasha Barak was commissioned into the Army Air Defence in September 2018. She then completed the year-long course at the Combat Army Aviation Training School in Nashik and, in May 2022, became the Indian Army’s first woman combat aviator, as The Hindu and other papers reported at the time.

Her career after Nashik took her to United Nations peacekeeping: Wikipedia records that she was named the UN’s Military Gender Advocate of the Year for 2025, and that the Prime Minister congratulated her on 7 June 2026. For the school, her course was a symbolic first; how many women have followed her through Nashik was not confirmed for this page.

The school is training for a corps that is changing fast. In 2022 the army raised its first squadron of HAL Prachand light combat helicopters, in 2024 a squadron for the AH-64E Apache, and in March 2025 the Defence Ministry ordered 90 more Prachands for the army. At the other end of the fleet, the Cheetahs and Chetaks of the 1970s are due to be replaced by HAL’s Light Utility Helicopter, whose deliveries Wikipedia projected from 2026. All of that means more pilots, and more of them trained for attack helicopters rather than for observation flying.

The corps celebrated its 40th raising day on 1 November 2025 under Lieutenant General Vinod Nambiar, its Director General and Colonel Commandant. All India Radio’s report of the day described a corps that had evolved over four decades into a powerful and indispensable combat force.