Goa's Dabolim airport to be spruced up

The Dabolim Airport is all set to get a new look as per the International standard after acquiring a land of 9 acres from the Navy. The Airports Director Paul Manickam stated that the runway will be expanded and a parking space for around 5 aircrafts will be constructed in order to ease the parking congestion at the airport. Besides this he stated that they are going to expand the building and will have an international standard state-of-the-art facility which will be completed by 2008. This will ease the problem of the passengers as there will be escalators and aero bridges.The Special Officer on Duty M. Narendra said that International Terminal building will be extended and will have walkalators which will take the passengers from one place to another and other modern facilities such as aero bridges which will be linking directly to the aircraft so that the passengers are connected to the building with the help of these aero bridges.

He further added that there will be altogether 7 aero bridges to board and off load the passengers from the plane and it will be a new concept in Goa and 7 big aircrafts can be parked along these aero bridges. He added that to complete the project the AAI will have to acquire these 9 acres of land from the Navy and only after this all the above-mentioned facilities will be constructed. Dabolim Airport was facing severe congestion problems especially with more and more charter flights coming to Goa. In a bid to ease this congestion, AAI in collaboration with the Indian Navy had planned to build a new terminal with four aero bridges to facilitate landing of wide-bodied aircrafts as part of strengthening the Dabolim airport at Goa. According to Dr Wilfred de Souza, deputy chief minister, “AAI will soon press into service the instrument landing facility to operate in nights.

As part of the talks between the Navy — which has been controlling the Goa airport — and the AAI, the Navy has agreed to allow direct landing of all scheduled flights in Goa instead of Mumbai even as Air India is considering starting a direct flight between Dubai and Goa.Over the past few months, several foreign private airlines including Virgin Airlines from Europe, Lufthansa from Frankfurt, Midland from Manchester and Air Arabia from Sharjah are ready to run flights directly to Goa.According to D’Souza, “all these steps were to strengthen the existing airport in Goa to meet the projected future traffic, which was expected to touch 4,308 international flights and 17,480 domestic flights by the year 2013-14 as against 1,402 and 7,422 flights, respectively, in 1995-96”.With the government pressing for the expansions, the AAI will complete the upgrading and expansion of facilities at the Dabolim international airport by the end of 2007.

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