Coming soon: 6-lane road under IGI runway

New Delhi: By October, you could be driving through an underground tunnel below IGI Airport's main runway -- with planes landing and taking off on top -- to speed away to the new domestic-cum-international terminal (T3) that will start opening in three months from now.
Worried that the existing single approach to the T3 site, next to the existing international terminal, will become a traffic nightmare once almost all domestic and entire foreign passengers drive to and from there, the government wants the new link ready in time for the Commonwealth Games that start from October 3.
The plan is to have the new road from Dwarka roundabout's lane towards Mehramnagar turn (near the existing domestic airport), take it under the main runway and then connect it to a link road that will lead to T3. Currently, this one-way link road is used by people coming from the international airport to drive to Vasant Kunj from under the Radisson flyover.
"The six-lane new link will be about 1.5km long with the tunnel portion under the runway being 343 metres. The total cost will be about Rs 65 crore. The plan is that Delhi government will fund the project that would be implemented by Airports Authority of India (AAI) and maintained by the Delhi International Airport Pvt Ltd (DIAL)," a source said.
This proposal is learnt to have been taken up at a recent joint meeting of all stakeholders like aviation ministry, Delhi government, AAI, DGCA and DDA and chaired by the cabinet secretary. "All security issues related to a road running under an operational runway and airport have been taken care of," said a highly placed source.
As per the plan, work on the tunnel portion should start and be completed when the main runway is closed for recarpeting from March to September.
07/01/10 Saurabh Sinha/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Jan 2010