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IGI airport first in India to cross 5 crore flyer mark
NEW DELHI: In a first for any Indian airport, IGI Airport crossed the 5-crore passenger mark last year.
The airport with three runways and as many terminals handled 5.5 crore passengers: 4 crore domestic and 1.5 crore international flyers. Mumbai was a distant second at 4.4 crore.
Highlights
- The airport with three runways and as many terminals handled 5.5 crore passengers
- This was 21% higher than 4.6 crore passengers IGI had handled in 2015
This was 21% higher than 4.6 crore passengers IGI had handled in 2015, according to figures furnished by the Delhi International Airport Pvt Ltd (DIAL).
India’s international flyers generally grow at 10% year-on-year while domestic travellers, dependent on oil prices that determine airfares, has grown at over 20%+ in the recent past.
With Delhi and Mumbai alone accounting for almost 10 crore of the total (domestic-cum-international) traffic that is expected to be just over 15 crore in 2016, the two mega cities account for twothird of entire air traffic in India. But with both these places facing challenges – Mumbai is majorly low on airport capacity while Delhi is seeing bottlenecks at its domestic budget terminal -the growth is bringing its own challenges.
Successive Union governments have been talking of clearing a second airport for Delhi, but there has been no concrete move on that front. The aviation ministry last year approved a revised master plan for IGIA under which it will get a bigger budget terminal; a new one and the fourth runway . However, DIAL has so far neither shared the details of that plan, nor given a timeline and cost estimate for executing the expansion work.
“IGI has huge tracts of open land where more terminals and another runway can be built. The problem area is Mumbai. Navi Mumbai is a very challenging site where hills have to be levelled and rivulets diverted.But apart from that site, there is no other place of that size available that can house Mumbai’s second airport,” said a source.
Delhi’s record comes at a time when the country set new highs for both domestic and international air travel last year, primarily because of low international oil prices that allowed airlines to offer cheap fares. Almost 10 crore domestic passengers flew in India in 2016, up 23% from 2015’s figure of 8.1 crore. The number of international flyers last year is likely to be over 5.2 crore, up almost 9% from the previous year’s 4.8 crore.
New Credit: TOI
Title: IGI airport first in India to cross 5 crore flyer mark
Description: In a first for any Indian airport, Delhi's IGI Airport crossed the
5-crore passenger mark last year. The airport with three runways and as many terminals
5.5 crore passengers: 4 crore domestic and 1.5 crore international flyers. Mumbai was
a distant second at 4.4 crore.
Keywords: IGIA,IGI Airport, IGI, Delhi International Airport Pvt Ltd, Delhi Airport
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