Bangalore's new airport takes off, finally

After several delays, the Bengaluru International Airport began operations on Friday at 10 pm

BANGALORE: After weathering many storms, Bengaluru International Airport (BIA) finally took off on Friday with Indian Airlines flight IC609 from Mumbai touching the runway at 10.40 pm.

The atmosphere at the new Bangalore airport was thick with uncertainty as operator Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) formally launched its operations. Adding to the confusion was the airport’s public relations agency’s inability to confirm whether the first flight to land there was Jet Airways or Indian Airlines.

The plush new airport, which saw its launch date being deferred three times on flimsy grounds, has been designed to handle over 12 million passengers annually. With BIA’s launch, Bangalore’s old airport HAL will close to commercial flights.

HAL was designed for an annual load of 2.5 million passengers but its capacity was stretched to 10 million passengers as air traffic grew significantly at the information technology hub in the last few years.

Last Wednesday, BIAL CEO Albert Brunner had said that the new airport could handle the high traffic and its terminal could accommodate 2,733 passengers in peak hours.

With 42 parking bays and eight aerobridges, the new airport has the capacity to handle 720 aircraft movements per day.

BIA shareholders include Siemens Project Ventures, Larsen & Toubro, Unique Zurich Airport, and the governments of India and Karnataka.

Due to growing business activity, the southern city attracts a number of business travellers. Corporate houses and frequent fliers have repeatedly complained about the distance of the new airport from the city.

“Seventy-five percent of Bangalore’s air traffic is business travel, and if it takes four to five hours to get to the airport and come back to the city, how can you do business?” said Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairperson of biotechnology firm Biocon Ltd.

The Bangalore City Connect Foundation, an association of business leaders in the city, has urged authorities to keep the HAL airport open. According to the association’s chairman M Lakshminarayan, the city does need an international-quality airport and is open to the new airport. “But let’s also utilise the infrastructure that is already there,” he said.

India’s airports are struggling to cope with a boom in the civil aviation sector, which is growing at more than 25% a year, mainly due to rapidly rising incomes and the launch of many budget airlines.

The government has started awarding contracts to private companies to modernise some of the country’s state-run airports that lacked basic facilities and were unable to handle the growing number of passengers.

Overhauling India’s creaking infrastructure is an urgent need as the country grows. But in Bangalore, some worry that privatisation has been badly planned. About 5 million people flew in and out of Bangalore when the government signed the pact with BIAL in 2004. Now the figure is 10 million, and likely to reach 15 million in a couple of years. “Things have changed dramatically in the last three to four years. We feel the new airport will outstrip its capacity very soon,” said TV Mohandas Pai, the director of human resources at Infosys Technologies, India’s second largest software services exporter.

But BIAL’s Brunner asserts that the new airport can cope.

“We can easily handle 14 million passengers at our airport. So, these allegations are baseless,” he said. “Nevertheless, we want to be a world-class airport, and for that reason immediately after the airport opening we go into the next expansion phase.” Earlier, budget carriers too were protesting BIA’s high airport fees and distance. But now, they have agreed to operate flights from the new airport.

“The first flight out of the new airport will be DN 763 to Mumbai at 5.53 am and the first flight to land at BIA will be DN 661 from Delhi at 6.45 am,” said a Deccan statement.
 
p_sharma@dnaindia.net
(Reuters contributed to this story)