Mumbais new airport faces traffic woes as it takes on Singapore and Dubai

For a first-time customer, touchdown in India’s financial capital Mumbai might be fairly an expertise.

At strategy, as the flight cuts across the Arabian Sea and flies past the mangrove marshes, the great metropolis emerges – swarming with railway tracks, towering skyscrapers and the dense habitation of Asia’s largest shantytown pressed tightly against the airport’s periphery wall.

For years, aviation consultants have flagged the risks and inefficiencies of working an overworked airport proper in the center of such an city setting, with buildings obstructing the flight path and security and operational constraints stopping pilots from utilizing the intersecting runways at once.

But a long overdue different is finally on the horizon.

After quite a few delays and impediments, the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) is set for inauguration soon and anticipated to get operational in the approaching months.

The airport will “significantly ease congestion” in India’s financial capital, Arun Bansal, the CEO of Adani Airport Holdings Limited, the working company, told the BBC.

“The current airport has hit its capacity of 55 million passengers annually. There’s already demand for an additional 20 million and we are set to meet that at Navi Mumbai,” said Mr Bansal.

While quite a few connectivity, integration and coverage associated hurdles still need to be ironed out, the airport’s opening will flip a important new chapter in India’s aviation ambitions.

Spread over 1,100 hectares and positioned some 40km (24 miles) from the outdated business centre of Mumbai, the sprawling new airport is linked to the island metropolis by India’s longest sea-bridge. It has two parallel runways and will finally deal with 90 million passengers per yr, following subsequent phases of enlargement.

“NMIA will make Mumbai the first large Indian city to operate two airports – a demonstration of the growing importance of India as an aviation market with rapidly increasing passenger and air traffic,” said Shukor Yusof of Singapore-based Enadu Analytics.

The sector has seen double-digit growth in the last 4 years – outpacing most other areas in the world. Indian airways have positioned orders for some 1,900 new plane, a thousand of that are anticipated to be delivered in the next 5 years, making such infrastructure critically important to accommodate this new fleet.

Adani says NMIA can be India’s first absolutely digital airport that’s been “designed and developed specifically to become a hub airport” with superior technology for check-in, security, baggage and boarding drastically lowering turnaround instances and facilitating straightforward transfers.

It has already announced a partnership with India’s largest and latest carriers, Indigo and Akasa Airlines, who are launching new routes. And Air India has dedicated to flying to 15 cities from the airport, regularly scaling up operations, including flights to worldwide locations.

Given how starved Mumbai’s current airport is for capability, analysts count on strong uptake for NMIA’s parking slots from airways wanting to launch new routes.

But major challenges are anticipated as operations begin in the approaching months.

Given how far the airport is, its location could possibly be a important inconvenience to passengers – both when taking flights to and from NMIA, and particularly when utilizing it for connecting flights.

It can simply take between two and three hours to attain the airport from sure suburbs of Mumbai.

A direct 20-minute metro line between the outdated and the new airports is probably going to develop into a actuality only after a few years. In the interim, NMIA is planning to present electric buses at common intervals for passengers with connections.

“This is not ideal,” says Alok Anand, a Bengaluru city-based aviation guide, but it is typical of many initiatives in India where supporting infrastructure follows, slightly than being constructed in tandem.

“Until last mile connectivity is fixed, I don’t foresee anyone landing at one airport and travelling to the other to catch another flight,” Mr Anand says.

It’s most likely why, for now, both the present and the new airport will deal with home and worldwide traffic, even though in the longer run, when connectivity improves, abroad flights could completely fly from NMIA.

Connectivity and regulatory points might also develop into impediments to NMIA’s ambitions to make Mumbai an worldwide hub like Singapore or Dubai – where flights come from numerous locations and join passengers to onward routes around the world.

While NMIA, along with a few other airports in cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru, are technologically superior and compete with some of the best in the world, India still wants to revise its insurance policies to facilitate smoother transfers, which is key to succeeding as a hub, say consultants.

“For instance, to transfer from domestic to international terminals or vice versa, one needs to undergo security screening again, which is not required at most major global airports,” says Ajay Awtaney, editor of LiveFromALounge, an online aviation and hospitality portal.

“Additionally, we need to reassess our security practices to improve the efficiency of passenger throughput. Our contact frisking at the airport takes significantly more time than other airports, which have transitioned to body scanners,” Mr Awtaney provides.

Mr Bansal agrees that a lot of this will need to fall in place before Mumbai’s aviation profile is raised to global requirements.

A change in regulation, he says, will also need to be accompanied by airways’ willingness to develop their selection of long-haul locations. Carriers will also have to optimise their fleet strategy and connections to have the ability to leverage the town’s strategic location benefit between Europe, the US and Asia.

For now, NMIA solves the town’s quick drawback – acute air traffic congestion.

It will also serve as a bigger catchment space, which might lengthen all the way in which to the neighbouring Pune metropolis, a major IT and training hub.

“Some of the major cities around the globe, such as New York, London, Dubai, and Tokyo, all operate with two to three airports. Mumbai will join this select club,” says Mr Awtaney.

And so will Delhi, where a third airport – Jewar – is all set to open in the approaching months, to serve the capital’s satellite tv for pc areas.

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