The airfield on Willingdon Island was built in 1936 by the Cochin Port Trust, in Kochi harbour. During the Second World War it was used by the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. It was a natural home for the post-independence navy’s first aircraft, because it lay next to the navy’s southern establishments, today the headquarters of Southern Naval Command at INS Venduruthy.

On 11 May 1953 the navy inaugurated the naval air station, later named INS Garuda, and the same day commissioned the Fleet Requirement Unit at Venduruthy II: two Short Sealand amphibians, five pilots and two observers, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Y. N. Singh. It was a small start for a navy that would within eight years have an aircraft carrier.

Willingdon Island is itself man-made. It was created during the construction of Kochi’s modern port in 1936, from soil dredged out of the Vembanad Lake to deepen the harbour, in a project led by the chief engineer, Robert Bristow, who owned the first building on the island. The same year the Cochin Port Trust built the airstrip.

The war turned it into a naval air station long before India had a navy air arm. The Royal Air Force developed the aerodrome, and on 1 October 1942 the Royal Navy took it over and commissioned it as HMS Garuda, an aircraft repair yard with a capacity of 180 aircraft, according to Wikipedia. It was decommissioned on 1 April 1946. When the Indian Navy commissioned its own air station here seven years later, it took the British name with it.

For decades the airfield also served civil flights. Wikipedia says the island airport’s civil enclave was shut down when Kochi got its international airport at Nedumbassery, 25 km north-east of the city, leaving the field to the navy.

The Fleet Requirement Unit’s first job was to serve the fleet: towing targets and providing aircraft for exercises. Two Fairey Fireflies joined in February 1954, and on 15 June 1959 the unit was recommissioned as INAS 550, again under Y. N. Singh. It re-equipped with Britten-Norman Islanders in 1976 and with Dornier 228s in the late 1990s; through the late 1980s and the 1990s it flew observer training, maritime reconnaissance and patrol missions.

As of 2024, INAS 550 gives Dornier operational flying training to fixed-wing pilots. Garuda’s wider training role is just as important: Wikipedia lists the Observer School, the School for Naval Airmen, the Naval Institute of Aviation Technology, the Aeronautical Training Institute and the School for Naval Oceanography and Meteorology on the station. A preserved Sea Hawk stands at Garuda, one of several in India.

With runways of 1,414 and 1,817 metres, Garuda was never a fighter base. Its operational squadrons have been helicopters and drones: Wikipedia’s 2011 roster lists INAS 336 with Sea King Mk.42B anti-submarine helicopters, INAS 321 and 322 with Chetaks and Dhruvs for search and rescue, and INAS 342 with Heron and Searcher drones. The Searchers were withdrawn in December 2024 and the Mk.42B in June 2026, according to Wikipedia.

Their successor arrived at Kochi first. On 6 March 2024 the navy commissioned INAS 334 at INS Garuda as its first squadron of Sikorsky MH-60R Seahawks, the anti-submarine helicopter bought from the United States in 2020; the second squadron followed at Goa in December 2025.

The change is a generational one. The Sea King Mk.42B, 20 of which were delivered between 1988 and 1992, combined dipping sonar for submarine hunting with two Sea Eagle anti-ship missiles, and served Garuda’s anti-submarine squadron for more than three decades. The MH-60R is described by the navy’s broadcaster as an all-weather, day and night helicopter for anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare, search and rescue, medical evacuation and vertical replenishment; the purchase was cleared by the Cabinet Committee on Security on 19 February 2020.