Punjab's international gateway is Sri Guru Ram Dass Jee International Airport at Amritsar, which carries pilgrim and diaspora traffic to Britain, Europe, the Gulf and, intermittently, Canada.
Shaheed Bhagat Singh International Airport at Mohali, adjoining the Chandigarh air force station, serves the Chandigarh region. Adampur near Jalandhar, Bathinda and Ludhiana have small terminals with intermittent service, several of them on air force stations.
Amritsar's traffic is overwhelmingly diaspora: a very large proportion of its passengers are Punjabis going to or coming from Britain, Canada and Italy, and its schedule reflects the Doaba and Majha's emigration map.
The long campaign for more direct flights from Amritsar to Canada, run largely by diaspora organisations, is one of the more single-minded lobbying efforts in Punjab.
A great deal of Punjab's traffic still goes through Delhi, which adds a road journey of several hours at each end.
The state's connectivity is a diaspora infrastructure question rather than a business travel one, which makes it unlike almost any other Indian state.
It is named for Guru Ram Das Ji, who founded the city. The terminal was rebuilt in the 2000s and the runway takes wide bodied aircraft, which is the technical reason direct long haul out of Amritsar is possible at all.
Passengers from the Doaba are two hours from it and fly out of Delhi anyway, because the fare is lower and the connections are more numerous. The problem is not the terminal. An airline needs a full aircraft in both directions and this traffic runs heavy one way at a time, by season.
An air cargo terminal at Amritsar has been asked for repeatedly by the state's exporters, because a landlocked exporter's only fast route out is by air and there is not one.