Flight trial operations of the Kannur International Airport, built at a cost of INR 1,892 crore, will commence in January next year, in preparation for the launch of commercial operations in September 2018. “A trial flight is expected from Delhi to caliberate the radar system. We have requested them to conduct the operations in early January,” said P Bala Kiran, managing director, Kannur International Airport (KIAL). Once operational, this will be the fourth international airport in Kerala after the ones at Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode.
The works on both airside and city side of the airport which has come up on a sprawling 2,092 acres in Mattanur, is almost complete and by February 2018 all the works are expected to be completed, he said. The airport with a runway of 3,050 metres can operate Boeing B-777s and Airbus A-330s.
There are plans to increase the runway length to 4000m in two years time, Bala Kiran informed. Another 260 acres would be acquired for increasing the runway length, he said, adding the survey for the same has been completed and notices for land acquisition have to be issued.
The orientation of the runway permits an obstacle-free approach. The airport’s apron has parking bay and can accommodate 20 Boeing-737s and several smaller aircraft at a time.
KIAL is hoping that in the first year of operations, the passenger traffic will touch one million and within five years 4.5 million – both international (80 per cent) and domestic (20 per cent) together.
Of the INR 1,892 crore project cost, INR 1,000 crore has been raised through equity and remaining as bank loans. When asked about the two year delay in the commissioning, Bala Kiran said the earlier target of September 2016 was “extremely optimistic.”
The work of the airport had started in February 2014 in a hilly area and being able to commission it by September 2018 was no small achievement, he said.
Bala Kiran, who is also the state’s tourism director, said with the airport’s commissioning, they were expecting tourist inflow to leapfrog from the Malabar region in North Kerala. Now Malabar hardly accounts for 10 per cent of tourists.
“With the government’s new tourism policy, we believe the numbers will go up to 30 per cent by 2021,” he said.
