Delivering a talk on ‘Airport Services - Current Limitations and the Trends’, S R Iyer, deputy general manager, Airport Services Division, HAL said the situation at the new Bengaluru International Airport would be ‘bad’ as it would be plagued by a number of constraints.

“The airport will be saturated within its first year as the prediction is - close to 40 million passengers are expected to use the airport. Even in case the new airport has an additional runway which is at present yet to be approved by the Ministry of Defence, the airport will not be able to take 20 million passengers,” said Mr Iyer.

He said the promoters should immediately start the Phase - 2 and Phase - 3 projects of the airport to meet the every increasing demand.

“For this summer, around 448 landing slots have already been booked. To start with, the new airport will have only 42 parking bays which is insufficient for a green field airport,” he added.  The existing HAL airport itself has 37 parking bays. He also said that the airspace available to the new airport would only be 35 to 40 per cent, and the rest would be taken by the HAL and Air Force Station, Yelahanka.

Suggesting the need to review the existing civil aviation rules and to upgrade the technology and infrastructure facilities, he said that new airports should come up while retaining the existing ones. “We need to create independent parallel runways with parallel and rapid exit apart from privatising the Air Traffic Control,” he added.