DG Khan Airport international upgrade targets January 2028: Leghari

DG Khan Airport's upgrade to international standard will wrap by January 2028, Awais Leghari said, putting a hard target on a piece of work that has sat on Pakistan's infrastructure backlog for years.

The airport sits in southern Punjab's Dera Ghazi Khan district and currently handles domestic traffic only. Leghari's timeline commits the Civil Aviation Authority to a fixed window for the runway, terminal and customs work that converts a regional strip into a border-crossing gateway.

What does Leghari's announcement cover?

The January 2028 target is the first concrete finish date attached to the international upgrade. Pakistan's aviation ministry has talked about expanding secondary airports for years, but completion dates have slipped on similar projects at Sialkot, Faisalabad and Rahim Yar Khan.

A minister-level commitment, on the record, narrows the political space for further delays — but only if the underlying engineering, land and budget pieces hold. Leghari spoke at a briefing carried by Islamabad Post.

The announcement gives the CAA a deadline it can be measured against, which matters in a sector where timelines tend to drift. It also sets a public benchmark for the aviation ministry's secondary-airport programme, where most projects have run years past their original completion targets.

What's missing from the announcement?

No cost figure has been disclosed, and the CAA's published capital plan does not break out a DG Khan line item. Contractors have not been named, and the announcement leaves unconfirmed the runway length required for regional international aircraft.

The runway question is the load-bearing one. The current strip is short of ICAO Code 4C standards, the lower end for narrowbody jets such as the Boeing 737 or Airbus A320. Extending the strip requires land acquisition from surrounding agricultural plots — a process that has stalled earlier attempts at the site.

The terminal itself, customs halls, immigration counters and the air-traffic upgrades that ICAO and the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority require for international status are standard infrastructure works. They take time but rarely take years. The runway is the variable.

Why does southern Punjab need international links?

DG Khan's district borders Balochistan to the west and sits across the Indus from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The closest international airport is Multan International, roughly 250 kilometres east, which means southern Punjab and parts of eastern Balochistan currently drive three to four hours for outbound international flights.

A working international airport at DG Khan would give the region a direct outbound point for labour migration to the Middle East — a meaningful flow from this part of Pakistan — and for trade with Iran via the border crossings near Taftan and Gabd. It would also relieve Multan, which absorbs the region's international load today and has been pushing its own terminal capacity.

For carriers, a DG Khan international gateway would open a thinner route — point-to-point service to Gulf destinations rather than the Multan-bus connection that passengers from DG Khan currently endure. Whether airlines commit depends on the catchment's yield and the airport's landing fees, neither disclosed.

What has to happen before January 2028?

The CAA will need to clear three milestones to hit the date:

• A finalised cost and engineering design
• Land acquisition for any runway extension
• Regulatory certification with ICAO compliance

Each has slipped past deadlines on other Pakistani secondary-airport programmes. Sialkot's international terminal took years of delay before its opening; Faisalabad's expansion has run since the late 2010s without a firm completion date; Bahawalpur's runway upgrade was announced in the early 2020s and is still in progress.

If Leghari's date holds, DG Khan joins the working list of Pakistan's international gateways. If it slips, the district's traffic will keep routing through Multan — a longer drive, a longer day, and a missed connection for a region that has waited on this upgrade for over a decade.