Delhi Airport

The dream of having an airport in Arunuchal Pradesh’s capital city is on its way to becoming a reality after the union finance ministry on Friday cleared the proposal for the greenfield airport in Hollongi.

The Ministry of Environment and Forest and the Steering Committee of the Ministry of Civil Aviation had also cleared the proposal for the greenfield airport on December 28^Th.

Chief Minister Pema Khandu said the greenfield airport, estimated at a cost of Rs 1,055 crore, will be a state-of-the-art infrastructure which will propel economic development besides improving connectivity for the local population.

After a detailed discussion, the Public Investment Board of the Finance Ministry approved the land acquisition rate as proposed by the committee and endorsed by the state government.

However, the board noted that it would be the responsibility of the state to hand over the land free of all encumbrances to the Airport Authority of India and set a target to have the airport ready within 4 years.

According to Mr Pema Khandu “It’s matter of great joy for Team Arunachal that today the decades-old dream of having our own airport has been realized. I thank the the government of India for their unstinted support in having this project see the light of day,”

Bengaluru’s international airport is expecting passenger traffic to surge by 70% over the next two years as multinational companies pour money into the city known as the Silicon Valley of India.

Airport authorities laid out plans on Thursday for a nearly $2 billion investment that will add a new terminal and a second runway, boosting the airport’s capacity to 45 million passengers per year.

The Kempegowda International Airport, already the third busiest in India with 27 million passengers in 2017-18, is expecting traffic to triple in the next 10 years.

Authorities have said that they plan to make Bengaluru Airport as big as the Heathrow Airport in London. (London’s Heathrow Airport had about 78 million passengers walk through its terminals in 2017)

Along with a new terminal, Bangalore International Airport Ltd is also nearing completion of a second runway, capable of handling Airbus’s A380s(The World’s largest aircraft) and operating in near zero visibility.

The parallel runway construction at Kempegowda will be finished by the end of September 2019. The second runway will be four kilometre long.

The new terminal T2 will be built in two phases. The first phase will have 25 million passenger capacity. The new terminal will be environment-friendly and will adhere to the ‘The city of gardens’ image of Bengaluru. The terminal building will have lush green cover with trees specific to the city.

By September 2019, 3,000 acre will be developed out of the 4,000 acre the airport has. The airport is also in talks with airlines in India to make the Bengaluru airport their hub.

India’s total passenger traffic rose about 16.5 % in 2017-2018 to nearly 309 million, according to the Airports Authority of India, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing aviation markets. Boeing Co expects the country to become the third-largest commercial aviation market by the early 2023.

Passengers travelling to the Chennai airport will soon be able to shop at a mall, watch a movie & stay in a hotel.

Airports Authority Of India is going to build these facilities in the 2 multi-level car parks which are being build on either side of the airport.

The ministry of environment and forest has given the green signal for construction of these facilities as part of the six-level 2,000-car park project.

Here are the details of this project:

• The mall and multiplex will come up in the complex on the east side of the airport metro station while the hotel will come up on the west side.
• There will be seven levels of parking in the east block and six levels in the west block.
• The parking lot with its mall and hotel would be connected to the airport building using a link bridge
• This link bridge would connect to the walkalator tube that runs parallel to the domestic and international terminal
• Initially, the mall and the hotel were meant primarily for the passengers but visitors too would be able to make use of them.

The hotel will help transit passengers find good accommodation without travelling to the city. Transit rooms are no longer available at the airport as the old domestic terminal complex, which housed them, has been pulled down to construct an integrated terminal.

The airport currently sees a traffic of more than 5,000 cars a day. The multi-level car park will also be of help when the integrated terminal is completed.

AAI has started work which is expected to be completed by July 2020.

If you pay close attention to most things you purchase at an airport, you’ll notice that they are mostly wrapped in plastic.

However, in a bid to make the airports greener, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) has imposed a ban on single-use plastics at 129 airports across the country.

According to a statement made by AAI, all airports will gradually become plastic-free, and this is the first step that the authority is taking towards going green.

Ahmedabad, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Dehradun, Indore, Kolkata, Madurai, Pune, Raipur, Tirupati, Trichy, Vadodara, Varanasi, Vijayawada and Vizag airports have already been declared plastic free. These airports were selected on the basis of the third-party assessment carried out by the Quality Council of India(QCI).

Various steps have been undertaken to eliminate single-use plastic items at passenger terminals and city side. These steps include banning of single-use plastic items like straws, plastic cutlery, plastic plates etc.

Elaborating upon the next step in this implementation, AAI said that it has also asked the QCI to check how the ban has been implemented at 34 airports across the country that handle about 10 lakh passengers every year.

Going a step ahead in making airports green, the AAI plans to use plastic waste to lay new roads and repair old ones on the city-side of its Chennai airport. The pilot project will be undertaken in either Madurai, Chennai or Thiruvananthapuram.

The project will be implemented for city-side roads first, and if successful, it will also be extended to run along the compound wall of the airports and later, on taxiways.

Cab services driven by women for female passengers were flagged off at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport(KIA) on Monday.

Karnataka State Tourism Development Corp (KSTDC) and Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) launched an all-women-run taxi service, Go Pink Cabs.

As the project is being run on an experimental basis, there are currently 10 taxis available, piloted by women drivers.

Apart from Uber, Ola, Karnataka Taxi, MegaCabs and Meru Cabs, women will now be able to book a Go Pink Cabs ride from KIA.

The cabs will be equipped with safety features, such as GPRS tracking and an SOS switch in case of any emergency. Solo female travellers or group of women can avail the cab services.

The pink cab service will be functional 24 hours and priced at Rs 21.50 per km during the day and Rs 23.50 per km at night.

According to KSTDC Managing Director Kumar Pushkar, the service has been implemented with an objective to provide a safe and secure mode of transport for women travellers from the airport, while also creating opportunities for women drivers to be self-employed.

The initiative is an effort to contribute to the socio-economic development of women from villages around the airport by recruiting women drivers from the vicinity.

Based on passenger feedback and demand, Go Pink Cabs will expand its fleet in the months to come.

For the 4^th time this month, fog disrupted flight operations at Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport with 38 departures being delayed on Sunday morning.

Around 11 arriving flights were also delayed as fog enveloped the airport for the second time in three days. On Friday morning, 50 flights were affected due to the same reason.

According to the Bangalore International Airport Limited, four flights, including three Air India flights from Ahmedabad, Vishakhapatnam and Dubai, and another Indigo flight from Delhi were diverted to Chennai and Hyderabad airports.

With an old Instrument Landing System in place at the KIA, fog-related disruptions have become an annual affair and are expected to last till February this year.

However, the commencement of flight operations on newly launched Runway 2, expected from September this year, will bring good news for KIA passengers.

Runway 2 comes equipped with a mechanism to help flight operations continue during foggy conditions as well as with improvised facilities for landing during low visibility.

In Delhi, however, there is no improvement in the situation, after 41 flights were delayed again due to heavy fog.

Delhi International Airport Limited on December 6 said that the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) is fully prepared to handle flight operations during dense fog.

The very next day, 362 flights were delayed and 38 cancelled. In fact, since the first week of December, there have been regular delays and cancellations at India’s busiest airport that handles 1,300 arrivals and departures every day. And it has hit passengers hard.

Passengers boarding airplanes for destinations like Kolkata, Srinagar, Pune and Mumbai had to stay put at the airport for over four hours as eight flights were delayed from the Chandigarh International airport due to poor visibility.

An Air India official said that the Alliance Air morning flight got delayed by around two hours owing to poor visibility. The ones majorly affected were flights arriving from Delhi as three of seven flights got delayed.

The flight scheduled to depart at 8:20 am, departed at 9:52 am, post the delay of 1 hour 32 minutes. He also said that the flight had a delayed departure from Delhi at 7 am while the scheduled time was 5:55 am.

IndiGo flight from Kolkata, which was supposed to arrive at 7:30 am, arrived at 12:30 pm because of the delayed departure. It departed at 9.20 am while it was scheduled to leave at 4:50 am.

The IndiGo flight from Srinagar got delayed as well, making its arrival at 3:23 against its scheduled arrival time of 10.45 am. The flight departed late at 2.15 pm against its scheduled departure of 9.30 am from Srinagar.

The Air India flight from Pune, who’s scheduled arrival time was 2:55 pm, was delayed by 1 hour 14 minutes and arrived at 4.09 pm.

Likewise, the flights departing from Chandigarh departed late. Flights of Air Asia from Bengaluru, IndiGo from Mumbai and Bengaluru, Air India from Delhi, and Jet Airways from Delhi were delayed between 45 minutes an hour and a half.

Air India, has stated to temporarily withdraw its morning Delhi-Chandigarh-Delhi flight owing to poor visibility at the airport.

Also, the Air India Kullu-Chandigarh-Kullu flight has also been withdrawn till January 15 due to bad weather conditions at the Bhunter and Chandigarh airports