Life after modernisation could be just as frustrating for fliers at Calcutta airport as it is now, warn airline officials.
The brains behind the city airport’s much-hyped new terminal could think of no more than 18 aerobridges to handle a projected traffic of 20 million passengers annually, which officials say will prove to be inadequate even with the current volume of traffic.
In contrast, Mumbai is prepared to handle 40 million passengers by 2013 with four times more aerobridges than its myopic metro cousin. Delhi’s Terminal 3 alone has 78 aerobridges for 35 million passengers annually.
“The integrated terminal in Calcutta has been designed in such a way that it has to make do with 18 aerobridges at the connecting bays. There is no provision for expansion. The other parking bays are far from the terminal, which means fliers have to be transported by bus,” an airport official involved in the modernisation project said.
The city airport currently has four aerobridges, three of them for domestic operations and one for the international terminal. On paper, 14 more aerobridges should make a big difference to terminal operations but officials foresee pressure building up during peak hours.
An aerobridge is a corridor connecting the terminal directly to the door of an aircraft. Not only does it spare airlines the trouble of ferrying fliers to the aircraft by bus, an aerobridge is also safer and a time-saver.
“Forget about what will happen when the number of flights in the city goes up. We need more aerobridges to maintain smooth inbound and outbound flier movement even in the present scenario. The morning and evening peak hours see more than 20 flights each, for which 18 aerobridges are inadequate,” an airline official said.
12/05/11 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph
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