As winter sets in, you will soon see news stories of flight delays at many airports, especially at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International airport. Long queues of passengers on the terminal side, long queues of aircraft on the air side of the airport will be seen and the situation at passenger hold areas will almost reach chaotic levels.
This is a predictable picture every year since the last few years and now it becomes even more serious because India’s aviation sector this year is seen growing at 20 per cent per annum!
While the economy is not doing that well, if the aviation sector grows at this rate, one can only imagine what will happen after the economy bottoms out of the current phase and reaches a growth rate of close to 8 per cent as it is expected to reach a couple of years from now. India’s aviation infrastructure is just not keeping pace with the rapid rate of the sector’s growth.
We have just not been able to build new airports, new runways, new terminal buildings and have not been able to expand the infrastructure at the rate required to keep pace with the needs of our aviation sector.
Just take the case of Mumbai and Pune airports. There have been discussions and planning going on for close to 15 years of building a second airport for India’s financial capital Mumbai. But nothing has moved till now in terms of actual construction starting at the project site.
The current international airport has two runways but they are not parallel to each other, runway 27-09 and runway 32-14 cross each other. So when there is small incident on one of the runways like the one happened in July this year with a Spicejet Boeing 737, all operations come to a grinding halt.
With 750 landings and takeoffs happening every day at this airport, there is hardly any scope for any error. If Mumbai had a second airport, all the load could have been divided.
Even if the construction at the new airport site at Navi Mumbai starts in the next one year or so, Mumbai will not have an active second airport at least till 2025, because it takes at least 7 to 8 years to build a fully equipped international airport.
Given the growth rate in passenger traffic at over 20 percent, one can only imagine what density Mumbai airport will have to handle a couple of years from now, that is from 2020 or 2021 onwards.
The case of Pune international airport is similar. The average growth at Pune is calculated now at around 24 per cent that is close to 4 per cent over the national average. The congestion at Pune airport is felt by passengers every day, during peak holiday seasons such as the upcoming Christmas season, the congestion will be even worse.
The airport terminal is in need of expansion and other services have to be capable of handling the additional traffic, which currently they are not able to handle. The project of building a second airport in Pune has more or less remained on paper for many years now. Land acquisition is facing many hurdles and because of political reasons, this land acquisition is likely to face further blocks from 2018 onward, as election season begins in January 2019!
( To be continued in tomorrow’s edition )
