Fresh turbulence hits Bangalore Airport

In a major embarrassment to the beleaguered Bangalore International Airport Authority Limited (BIAL), the Airport Authority of India’s (AAI) technical committee has concluded that the passenger handling capacity of BIA, both international and domestic terminals, had already reached the saturation point and both terminals were below international standards.
The Committee, in a report submitted to the High Court, said that there cannot be any further expansion of the terminals as they had reached their saturation point.
The four member team from AAI, who conducted the study at BIAL between June 16 and 18 this year, submitted the report to the High Court on December 19.
The report criticised the BIAL for not keeping in mind the traffic for the year 2015.
“It (BIAL) should have planned for higher capacity of traffic at the time of revision of the capacity in the year 2006.” In November, 2006, BIAL had forecast 11.4 million passengers for the year 2015.
However, the AAI forecast that traffic would cross 11.64 million passengers in both domestic and international terminals during 2008-09.
The report said that as per the concession agreement, BIAL was to provide an area of 27.3 square metres per Peak Hour Passenger (PHP).
But going against the norms, BIAL provided only 26 square metres per PHP for combined peak hour capacity.
Which meant that the PHP handling capacity worked out to 2,400 passengers per hour in domestic terminal as against the actual demand of 2,640 in June 2008. The annual capacity for handling domestic passengers was wrongly estimated to be around 7.96 million for 2007-08. The actual demand, in fact, would be around 8.57 million passengers.
So, the domestic terminal is already saturated, the report observes.
21/12/08 B Aravinda Shetty/ExpressBuzz

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Categories: Airports Dec 2008