Flight of fancy: An airport at Panvel makes no sense
ET SPECIAL:
By: Hormuz P Mama
Land acquisition for Mumbai's planned airport at Panvel has dragged on, as the owners demand . 20 crore an acre — about five times the market value. The City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco), the nodal agency for the project, claims that the land purchase should be over soon, and the airport should be operational in 2017. That is unlikely. The airport site is about the worst anywhere, from the ecological and civil engineering viewpoints.
Developers will have to change the course of the Ulwe River, widen the Gadhi River to avoid flooding, construct embankments of three smaller rivers, fill up Panvel Creek and reclaim the land around Waghivli Island. They will also have to level two hillocks , cut down 160 hectares of mangrove forests that protect the coast against erosion, and 130 hectares of reserved forest.
The ministry of environment and forests grudgingly cleared it only when told there was no alternate site. This is not true. The Karnala Bird Sanctuary's buffer zone is only 9.5 km from the airport site. Cidco said it was 12.5 km, to get the sanctuary declared a non-ecosensitive area, and avoid environmental clearance. Environmentalists have covered the impact of aircraft operations on birds, but no one has studied the impact of birds on aircraft operations.
Bird ingestion into aero-engines can be as fatal to aircraft and passengers as to birds — a key reason to drop the site. Delays have increased costs from Rs 4,766 crore in 2006-07 to Rs 14,573 crore. Actually, that may be an underestimate.
Site preparation could cost almost half that amount. One cannot have an entire new airport on a difficult site for that amount. The new airport will have mainly domestic operations, with international operations mostly at the present airport .
Much of the important transit traffic at Mumbai airport is domestic. So, international passengers arriving at Mumbai will travel to Panvel to catch their connecting flights, increasing transit time. Ideally, passengers should catch their connecting flights in the same terminal.
Also, Cidco has no experience of airport development — or of any other work of such complexity. While Panvel will have an ultimate annual capacity of 60 million passengers , Mumbai needs a 100-millionpassenger airport. Most major airports around India have that much ultimate capacity and also handle many more passengers annually than any Indian airport.
The figures for 2012 are: Jakarta 57.8 million, Dubai 57.7 million, Hong Kong 56.8 million, and Singapore 58.2 million. Delhi had 34.2 million and Mumbai 30 million, ranking 37 and 48 respectively , on world passenger rankings. Mumbai airport is turning away airlines and passengers, while competing airports try to attract them to increase global connectivity.
Mumbai airport is served by just 47 international airlines, with direct flights to only 41 destinations, while Singapore and Dubai airports have 106 airlines and 130 airlines, connecting them to 240 and 220 destinations, respectively. Mumbai airport is uncompetitive because of high charges and lack of capacity. An airport used by many airlines as a transit hub offers greater connectivity with major destinations globally, and higher frequency of services.
India does not have a single regional hub. The second airport at Panvel will put Mumbai at a competitive disadvantage . And it is not the only suitable site. Nevali has 1,700 acres of former defence ministry land, now with the state government. Local politicians campaigning for it had said that another 2,000 acres could be "easily acquired" . Environmentally and engineering-wise , it is problem-free .
View Larger Map
An airport there could be larger, come up faster and be cheaper than at Panvel. Mandwa-Rewas could have offered a dream airport, with over a million passengers a year capacity.
Opposition from people who distrust the politician-builder nexus killed it. A consultant recommended a common airport for Mumbai and Pune, as they have overlapping passenger catchment areas. The sites at Ansoli and Wada could also be looked at. The Panvel site could even seriously compromise Mumbai's status as commercial capital.
The writer is an independent aviation analyst
Kalyan International Airport was a proposed greenfield airport which if chosen would serve the as the second airport for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region The project site is located around an abandoned World War Two airfield near Kalyan in Thane district, Maharashtra, India.
Even as a three-member committee of experts began a review of options for the contentious second Mumbai airport,
now a political issue, the Union civil aviation ministry is stressing
why the idea of an alternative site at Kalyan was grounded in 2007.
In August 2007, former national security advisor (NSA) M K Narayanan had communicated to the then chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, that the airport could not come up there, on 1,800 acres of defence ministry land, as the area was near the site for a research and development laboratory of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). That BARC site could not be shifted, the NSA had said.
“The Maharashtra government had sought NSA’s opinion. NSA had clearly stated that as the BARC laboratory was being constructed in the adjacent area, the land was not suitable for airport development on safety and security grounds. The area around is already declared as a no-development zone,” civil aviation ministry sources told Business Standard.
BARC sources confirmed that a sophisticated laboratory was under construction in Kalyan.
State government officials said thereafter Kalyan had not been even considered an alternative site. The government and its undertaking, City and Industrial Development Corporation, have been pursuing Navi Mumbai as an alternative option.
Kalyan re-emerged as an alternative to the controversial Navi Mumbai site recently, with Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh saying he’d sent on requests of three MPs from Thane district (where Kalyan is) to the expert appraisal committee.
Land acquisition for Mumbai's planned airport at Panvel has dragged on, as the owners demand . 20 crore an acre — about five times the market value. The City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco), the nodal agency for the project, claims that the land purchase should be over soon, and the airport should be operational in 2017. That is unlikely. The airport site is about the worst anywhere, from the ecological and civil engineering viewpoints.
Developers will have to change the course of the Ulwe River, widen the Gadhi River to avoid flooding, construct embankments of three smaller rivers, fill up Panvel Creek and reclaim the land around Waghivli Island. They will also have to level two hillocks , cut down 160 hectares of mangrove forests that protect the coast against erosion, and 130 hectares of reserved forest.
The ministry of environment and forests grudgingly cleared it only when told there was no alternate site. This is not true. The Karnala Bird Sanctuary's buffer zone is only 9.5 km from the airport site. Cidco said it was 12.5 km, to get the sanctuary declared a non-ecosensitive area, and avoid environmental clearance. Environmentalists have covered the impact of aircraft operations on birds, but no one has studied the impact of birds on aircraft operations.
Bird ingestion into aero-engines can be as fatal to aircraft and passengers as to birds — a key reason to drop the site. Delays have increased costs from Rs 4,766 crore in 2006-07 to Rs 14,573 crore. Actually, that may be an underestimate.
Site preparation could cost almost half that amount. One cannot have an entire new airport on a difficult site for that amount. The new airport will have mainly domestic operations, with international operations mostly at the present airport .
Much of the important transit traffic at Mumbai airport is domestic. So, international passengers arriving at Mumbai will travel to Panvel to catch their connecting flights, increasing transit time. Ideally, passengers should catch their connecting flights in the same terminal.
Also, Cidco has no experience of airport development — or of any other work of such complexity. While Panvel will have an ultimate annual capacity of 60 million passengers , Mumbai needs a 100-millionpassenger airport. Most major airports around India have that much ultimate capacity and also handle many more passengers annually than any Indian airport.
The figures for 2012 are: Jakarta 57.8 million, Dubai 57.7 million, Hong Kong 56.8 million, and Singapore 58.2 million. Delhi had 34.2 million and Mumbai 30 million, ranking 37 and 48 respectively , on world passenger rankings. Mumbai airport is turning away airlines and passengers, while competing airports try to attract them to increase global connectivity.
Mumbai airport is served by just 47 international airlines, with direct flights to only 41 destinations, while Singapore and Dubai airports have 106 airlines and 130 airlines, connecting them to 240 and 220 destinations, respectively. Mumbai airport is uncompetitive because of high charges and lack of capacity. An airport used by many airlines as a transit hub offers greater connectivity with major destinations globally, and higher frequency of services.
India does not have a single regional hub. The second airport at Panvel will put Mumbai at a competitive disadvantage . And it is not the only suitable site. Nevali has 1,700 acres of former defence ministry land, now with the state government. Local politicians campaigning for it had said that another 2,000 acres could be "easily acquired" . Environmentally and engineering-wise , it is problem-free .
View Larger Map
An airport there could be larger, come up faster and be cheaper than at Panvel. Mandwa-Rewas could have offered a dream airport, with over a million passengers a year capacity.
Opposition from people who distrust the politician-builder nexus killed it. A consultant recommended a common airport for Mumbai and Pune, as they have overlapping passenger catchment areas. The sites at Ansoli and Wada could also be looked at. The Panvel site could even seriously compromise Mumbai's status as commercial capital.
The writer is an independent aviation analyst
Kalyan International Airport
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Kalyan International Airport कल्याण अंतरराष्ट्रीय विमानतळ |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| IATA: none – ICAO: none | |||
| Summary | |||
| Serves | Mumbai Metropolitan Region | ||
| Location | Kalyan, Maharashtra, India | ||
Contents
Preface
The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests raised environmental objections on the proposed location of the Navi Mumbai International Airport near Kopra Panvel area, because the construction of the airport would involve reclamation of low-lying areas in an ecologically fragile zone as well as destruction of several hectares of mangroves. The proposal of one of the alternate sites is centred around 1,800 acres (7.3 km2) of land owned by the Airports Authority of India, the site of an abandoned World War II era airfield[1] The Kalyan-Nevali location was to be considered for a future Kalyan International Airport to serve as a second International airport for the Mumbai Metropolitan region if the airport at Kopra Panvel was not approved.History
See also: RAF Kalyan
The airfield at Nevali was used by the Royal Air Force
pilots during World War II to give operational cover to the Bombay
region. Its concrete runways still exist, albeit in an abandoned state.
The ownership of the land resides with the Airports Authority of India, and the extract of 7/12 (land record) shows the ownership of the 1,700 acres (6.9 km2) of land is with the Airports authority of India.[2] A small portion of the land is used by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) for research activities. The total area of the Nevali air base was over 1,800 acres (7.3 km2). Post-Independence, the ownership of the land was transferred to the Ministry of Defence.Location
The airport is located on Malanggadh Road at village Nevali 12 km from Kalyan railway station and also 55 km away from the current CSIA airport at Sahar Mumbai. The location is close to urban areas of the Kalyan Dombivli Municipal Corporation including Kalyan, Dombivali, Bhivandi, Mira-Bhayander, Ambernath, Badlapur, Shahapur and Ulhasnagar The area is also close to the Highway intersection of Shil Phata. Nearest railway stations are Kalyan railway station, Ambernath railway station and Badlapur railway station on the central line of the Mumbai Suburban Railway network Nearest National Highways are the National Highway NH-222 and the National Highway 3Benefits of Kalyan location
- The Airbase still has a concrete runways that were used by the British warplanes during World war II, some old hangars as well as the remains of Control Cabin also present.
- The total area of the Nevali Airbase is over 1,800 acres (7.3 km2) which is relatively free of any natural obstacles, and, as there was an operational airbase 60 years ago, the site is already surveyed as fit for landings and takeoff of small aircraft.[citation needed]
- No possibility of CRZ (Coastal Regulatory Zone) violations, flattening of mountains or diversion of any rivers.
- The site has sufficient land for two parallel runways length 14,700 ft (4,500 m) or 4,500 mts in the direction 18L/36R and 18R/36L (North - South), additional 800-1000 acres of land can be easily acquired for further expansion like cargo hub and cargo handling facilities.[citation needed]
Present status
In October 2006 the Government of Maharashtra first proposed the Kalyan-Nevali site as a fit candidate for a third airport for the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. In August 2007, former national security advisor (NSA) M K Narayanan had communicated to the then chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, that the airport could not come up on the 1,800 acres of defence ministry land, as the area was near the site for a research and development laboratory of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC).as the laboratory was being constructed in the adjacent area, the land was not suitable for airport development on safety and security grounds.[3]References
- Jump up ^ http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_state-seeks-an-airport-in-kalyan_1060976 Government of Maharashtra seeks third airport for Mumbai in Kalyan
- Jump up ^ http://maharashtratimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6407658.cms Article in Marathi daily Maharashtra Times shows the 7/12 is with the Airports Authority of India
- Jump up ^ http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/nsa-had-rejected-kalyan-site-for-mumbai-airport-in-2007-110082000099_1.html NSA had rejected Kalyan site
External links
- Maha govt seeks approval for another airport this one in Kalyan
- 2nd Airport for Mumbai and how not to build it by Dorab Sopariwala
NSA had rejected Kalyan site for Mumbai airport in 2007
In August 2007, former national security advisor (NSA) M K Narayanan had communicated to the then chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, that the airport could not come up there, on 1,800 acres of defence ministry land, as the area was near the site for a research and development laboratory of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). That BARC site could not be shifted, the NSA had said.
“The Maharashtra government had sought NSA’s opinion. NSA had clearly stated that as the BARC laboratory was being constructed in the adjacent area, the land was not suitable for airport development on safety and security grounds. The area around is already declared as a no-development zone,” civil aviation ministry sources told Business Standard.
BARC sources confirmed that a sophisticated laboratory was under construction in Kalyan.
State government officials said thereafter Kalyan had not been even considered an alternative site. The government and its undertaking, City and Industrial Development Corporation, have been pursuing Navi Mumbai as an alternative option.
Kalyan re-emerged as an alternative to the controversial Navi Mumbai site recently, with Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh saying he’d sent on requests of three MPs from Thane district (where Kalyan is) to the expert appraisal committee.
