Mumbai needs second airport: IATA chief

Mumbai: About a fortnight before the environment minister of state, Jairam Ramesh, wrote to the chief minister asking him to shoot down the Navi Mumbai airport proposal, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) director general had stressed the urgent need for a secondary airport in Mumbai.
Apart from the Navi Mumbai site, the state has no alternate location in consideration for the city's proposed secondary airport.
In a letter, dated June 2, addressed to civil aviation minister Praful Patel, Giovanni Bisignani, the IATA director general wrote about the need to decongest Mumbai airport. "While Delhi is moving towards the capability of handling 100 million passengers, Mumbai remains a critical bottleneck. Given the constraints at the current airport location, India must develop a new Mumbai airport which can adequately serve the financial capital of the world's second most populous nation,'' Bisignani's letter stated. It may be noted though that the IATA chief was endorsing the idea of the need for a second airport for Mumbai and was not rooting specifically for the Navi Mumbai airport project.
The letter states that the breathing space provided by the current downturn must be used quickly to plan for capacity in the 100-million passenger range. "The current economic slowdown is also an opportunity to restart the shelved non-metro airport development program__which can only serve to further develop the domestic Indian market and connectivity,'' the letter said. The outlook has significantly deteriorated with airline revenues forecast to decline by 15 % or $ 80 billion in 2009. Net losses in 2009 are expected to be considerably higher than previous forecasts at $ 4.7 billion. The Indian carriers too are undergoing extreme financial and operational stress and in that light he criticised the recent increases in aeronautical charges in India as "disappointing and counter-productive.''
20/06/09 Times of India

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Categories: Airports Jun 2009, New Jun 2009