At last DIAL admits: Worked too fast at IGI

New Delhi: For the first time since the public outcry against the chaos at the international terminal, Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), the company renovating IGI Airport, has admitted its mistake: to tackle renovation work at a breakneck speed that put passengers in a fix.
“We learnt a lot with our experience,” DIAL’s chief operating officer Andrew Harrison said on Friday. “Looking back, we would do things differently. Our deadlines were aggressive, which caused a lot of inconvenience to passengers — and our staff, too.”
Harrison was addressing the media at the IGI international terminal during the first peek at the renovated terminal — work there got over on June 31. For the past more than six months, it took passengers between three and four hours to reach the aircraft after arrival at the airport.The traffic situation was no better outside the terminal.
DIAL was initially supposed to wrap up renovation work by March 30 this year, but it sought more time from the Civil Aviation ministry to reduce the chaos. DIAL’s pitch, Harrison said, was to take up renovation work of small portions of operational area at a time to reduce inconvenience.
Harrison said: “The situation was a little bad for a few months between November (2007) and January. Ideally we should have been renovating only 20 percent of the operational space, but with our deadlines we were working on 35 per cent of the operational space.” This, he said, was the “reason for all the trouble”.
19/07/08 Expressindia.com

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Categories: Airports Jul 2008