Business | Aviation
Gulf airport projects commercially viable
Mega airport projects being developed in the UAE and other Gulf Arab states will create an annual passenger handling capacity of more than 10 times the region's population by 2015 but these facilities are commercially viable, officials and experts said.
- By Shakir Husain, Staff Reporter
- Published: 23:32 June 2, 2008
Dubai: Mega airport projects being developed in the UAE and other Gulf Arab states will create an annual passenger handling capacity of more than 10 times the region's population by 2015 but these facilities are commercially viable, officials and experts said.
Speaking at a conference on 'Future Airports' in Dubai yesterday, officials said the growth of competing Gulf aviation hubs such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha will be under-pinned by rising East-West transit traffic and huge growth in the business and leisure travel within the region.
Paul Griffiths, chief executive officer of Dubai Airports, said the aviation sector in the region has been growing faster than global average.
He said Dubai International Airport will be among the world's top 10 airports in five years and passengers volumes will double in seven years.
The UAE alone will be able to process passengers in excess of 250 million a year at its airports, including the world's biggest Al Maktoum International Airport in Jebel Ali.
Inderjit Singh, senior vice-president of airport business development at Dubai Aerospace Enterprise, said despite the global airline industry facing a crisis due to rising fuel prices, passenger numbers globally will continue to rise.
Compared with 4.4 billion passengers in 2007, the number of air travellers will rise to 9.8 billion, or 135 per cent of global population, in 2027, he said.
There are at least a dozen airport runways are under construction or in planning in the Gulf region, and the value of airport projects under way is put around $40 billion.
Abu Dhabi Airport Company chief executive officer Rudy Vercelli believes populations in Africa, South Asia and the wider Middle East will sustain large-scale projects in the Gulf. "People tend to key in on the populations in the Gulf countries. But this is no longer the fact. We have a larger catchment area," he told Gulf News.
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