Riyadh airport traffic set to hit 14m passengers

Riyadh: The number of passengers who travelled via Riyadh's King Khaled International Airport (KKIA) is expected to reach 14 million by the end of the year, Engineer Abdullah Al Tasan, KKIA acting director-general, said.

In press statements, the KKIA chief noted that these forecasts were based on plans set for improving the airport's appeal while upgrading its facilities and services.

KKIA was officially opened in 1983. It has been achieving a steady increase in passengers, cargo handling and aircraft movements.

According to previous reports, the airport handled just over eight million passengers and had about 60,000 aircraft movements in 1998.

Last year the board of directors of the Saudi General Authority for Civil Aviation (GACA) approved the expansion plan for the airport.

When completed, the first phase of the project will increase the airport's capacity to 25 million passengers annually.

The first phase of this expansion project would cost 9.8 billion Saudi riyals. Phase one is also expected to increase the airport's cargo volume to 400,000 tonnes annually.

High growth rates

The second phase would bring the number of passengers to 47 million by 2038 and the volume of air cargo to 1.2 million tonnes.

Quoting statistics, the KKIA chief said the airport reported high growth rates in term of the number of passengers and cargo.

This was achieved thanks to efforts being made to improve operations and accelerate the finalisation of passengers' affairs, he added.

He noted passenger traffic from the beginning of 2010 till the end of October had grown by 8.9 per cent compared to the same period last year.

He added that the number of passengers reached 11,624,469 from January to October, compared to 10,676,163 passengers during the same period of 2009.

During the same period the movement of air cargo had grown by 20.7 per cent compared to the period from January to October 2009.