BIA like 'jatka' stand: HC

On Tuesday, a Karnataka High Court judge felt that BIA was no better than a ‘jatka (tonga) stand’.

The judge did not stop at that and, rubbing salt into the BIA’s injured pride, described the airport building resembling a matchbox. The judge’s comment, which also included an observation that BIA did not have a second runway or Category 3 Instrument Landing System, came in the midst of a hearing related to a matter on the closure of the HAL airport, which was being heard by a division bench of Justices V S Sabahit and S N Satyanarayana.

According to a report filed by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) on this matter, which is in stark contrast with BIAL, it was not consulted for the study on airport capacity assessment.

The report states that BIAL had conveniently misrepresented the concept of capacity assessment and could not be relied upon by the High Court. Hitting out at BIAL, the report goes on to state that peak hour capacity provided by BIAL was incorrect.

“BIAL has assessed the peak hour capacity for international departure as 896 and international arrival as 1188 which is not correct and no airport can afford to have such imbalances between arrival and departure capacity. Similar imbalances between arrival and departure has been given on the domestic side also. In light of these gross errors in calculation, the contentions of BIAL ought to be rejected outright,” the report revealed.
It is AAI’s contention that BIAL’s statements contained no substance and findings were not based on any substantive study. BIAL’s claim of 6,304 peak hour capacity was cooked up and inconsistent with the concession deal or International Air Transport Association norms.

The report mentions that airports at Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and terminal 5 at Heathrow provide an area of 60-85 sq mts per peak hour passenger (php). But BIAL provided 26 sq mts per php and if its claim of 6,304 peak hour capacity was taken into account, then BIAL provided only 11.3 sq mts per php.