'Panvel airport may be saturated in 25 years'

Mumbai: The city's second airport should not be built in Panvel, simply because it may reach its saturation level of 50 million passengers a year in just 25 years, which could prove to be grossly inadequate and lead to disastrous consequences for the economy, experts and concerned citizens said at a discussion organized by Observer Research Foundation (ORF) on Saturday.
Given the proximity of the site to the creek, there is little scope for expansion. Experts fear that by the time the airport reaches saturation, there will be no land available near Mumbai for a third airport.
Hence, the consensus was that the government must think big about Mumbai's new airport. The second airport must not only be built at the best possible site from the environmental point of view, it must have an ultimate capacity of at least 100 million passengers a year, which is the norm for all major airports in the world, including the one at Delhi.
Among the participants were Saroj Datta, executive director of Jet Airways, Hormuz P Mama, senior aerospace analyst, Jitender Bhargava, former executive director of Air India, T P Anantheswaran of IBM, Abhijit Mehta, president of Global Markets, economist Ajit Ranade, Sulakshana Mahajan, chief urban planner of the Mumbai Transport Support Unit, Luis Miranda, president and CEO of IDFC private equity, Narinder Nayyar, Chairman of Bombay First, transport activists Ashok Datar and Sudhir Badami and Sudheendra Kulkarni, chairperson of the ORF.
26/09/10 Anil Singh/Times of India

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Categories: airports Sep 2010