INS Hansa is older than its airfield. The navy commissioned the air station on 5 September 1961 at Sulur, near Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, where it shared an airfield with the Indian Air Force. That autumn the navy was preparing its first carrier, Vikrant, which had been commissioned at Belfast in March with Sea Hawks and Alizés, and needed a shore base for the air group.

The base it ended up with was captured. Portugal had built the Aeroporto de Dabolim in 1955 on 249 acres to serve Portuguese India and its airline, TAIP. When India moved against Goa in December 1961, the Indian Air Force bombed the airport and destroyed part of its infrastructure; during the night a TAP Constellation and a TAIP DC-4 escaped to Karachi with refugees. In April 1962 Major General K. P. Candeth, the army commander in Goa, handed the airfield to the navy, and INS Hansa moved from Sulur to the coast it has occupied ever since.

For two decades Goa was a Sea Hawk base. Then, on 16 December 1983, the first three Sea Harrier FRS.51s arrived at Dabolim, and INAS 300 became a V/STOL squadron; INAS 551 flew Harriers too between 1990 and 2005. India bought 30 Sea Harriers in all, but 17 crashed, killing seven pilots, and by 2009 only 12 were left. The survivors flew from the carrier Viraat for the last time on 6 March 2016, and on 11 May 2016 a ceremony at INS Hansa marked their retirement.

The MiG-29K had already arrived. Deliveries began in December 2009 and INAS 303 and INAS 300 are both MiG-29K squadrons at Hansa. To train pilots for carrier operations without a carrier, the navy built a Shore Based Test Facility at the base: a mock-up of the 283-metre deck of INS Vikramaditya, designed by Russia’s Nevskoye Design Bureau, which has also been used for the naval Tejas trials. The MiG-29K’s accident record is part of the base’s recent history: Wikipedia lists a MiG-29K that veered off the runway at Goa and caught fire on 3 January 2018, and another that crashed after taking off from INS Hansa on 23 February 2020.

Dabolim is two airports at once: a naval air station and, through a civil enclave, the older of Goa’s two airports. Wikipedia says military flight training takes the runway on five days a week from 08:30 to 13:00, when civilian flights cannot operate, blocking roughly 15 per cent of weekly capacity. That arrangement shaped the civil airport’s growth for decades.

The new Manohar International Airport at Mopa, in northern Goa, began operating on 5 January 2023, and since the 2023–24 financial year Dabolim’s passenger and cargo traffic has declined, according to Wikipedia. For the navy that means less pressure on its runway; for Dabolim’s civil terminal it means an uncertain future. Both users share the ICAO code VOGO.

Hansa is not only a fighter base. For decades the Il-38 maritime patrol aircraft flew from here; on 1 October 2002, during the squadron’s silver jubilee celebrations, two of them, IN302 and IN304, collided above Dabolim and all 12 crew were killed. The type was retired on 31 October 2023. Its successor, the P-8I, arrived at Goa from November 2020, and INAS 316 Condors was commissioned on 29 March 2022 to fly the four aircraft of the option contract.

Helicopters share the apron. Wikipedia lists INAS 339 with Ka-31 early warning helicopters, INAS 321 with Chetaks and Dhruv squadrons for search and rescue, and INAS 310 with Dorniers. On 17 December 2025 the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Dinesh K Tripathi, commissioned INAS 335 Ospreys, the navy’s second MH-60R squadron, with a water cannon salute; the broadcaster described it as adding to integral aviation on the western seaboard.