NAVI MUMBAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT MAY NOT OPEN BY

DESPITE MAHARASHTRA’S CHIEF MINISTER, Devendra Fadnavis harping that the rst phase of work on Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) will be completed by 2019, the civil aviation ministry thinks otherwise.

During the sixth US-India aviation summit, civil aviation secretary, RN Choubey said that even though work on NMIA is progressing as scheduled, meeting the 2019 deadline would be tough.

e estimated cost for completion of NMIA’s rst phase is `16,700 crores. In March it began with the levelling of Ulwe hill, the site where the terminal will come up.

In 1997, acknowledging the urgency to take the load o Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA), the state initiated dialogue for NMIA. Numeral delays later, the project is nally underway.

Passenger tra c at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) has been on a steady rise since a while now, and currently it is functioning beyond its full capacity of handling 45 million passengers per annum.

Earlier this year, Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation, Jayant Sinha said that in the next ve years, Navi Mumbai International Airport would be able to take the load o CSIA that has a “bottle-necked single runway”.

e new airport will have two parallel runways with a capacity to handle 80 ight movements per hour.

business traveller india SURESH PRABHU, Minister of Civil Aviation had tweeted that the aviation ministry has given a nod for Pune’s new airport to be built in Purandar. Pune’s only airport at Lohegaon is running beyond its full capacity. Passenger tra c has increased from...