Mumbai Aviation: A Soon To Be Extinct Species

Mumbai Airport, or as locally called the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport, is perhaps the most important place in the whole of India.

Be it Business, Glamour, Travel or a Fun trip, a person is most likely to land in Mumbai. This airport began operation as early as in the year 1942, this is one of the few airport in the world which is located in the middle of the city and not in the suburbs or the out skirts of the city. This airport is the hub for India`s flagship airline the Air India and its competitor Jet Airways. Time and again this airport has seen developments in the limited space, but there is no room for further development or to make a ground making change because of the lack of additional space. This airport has 2 very long runways, but then they cannot be used simultaneously due to their intersecting nature. 

Unlike the EU airports, this airport functions 24 hours round the clock, even with just a single runway operation this airport comfortably manages over 250,000 aircraft operations and almost over 3 million passenger pass through this airport annually. In February, 2014 Terminal 2 began operations which was perhaps the best terminal building which could have been ever built. It is not just a terminal or a building, it is a museum, it has tons of artwork, paintings, statues, etc, where seeing all the display items would need a 4km walk, pretty amazing. Having traveled to London`s Heathrow Airport, New York`s JFK Airport, Boston`s Logan Airport, Abu Dhabi Airport, Bangkok`s Suvarnabhumi Airport and a couple others, I can proudly say that India has made a big statement and shown the world what they can achieve when they are hell bent. A person having a connecting flight may miss the next flight as he may be so engrossed with the art work in this airport.

What is missing in Mumbai Airport ??

Being a huge business district, Mumbai definitely attracts a huge set of travelers, but what Airports Authority of India (AAI) failed to understand is that for airports to expand they must be extended horizontally and not vertically, but there is no space for the horizontal expansion,  and there you go, this is a need for a new airport at a new location close to Mumbai. The solution was Navi Mumbai Airport, which is a decade old plan and has been delayed by a number of reasons.

Will the Navi Mumbai Airport be enough ?

For starters the Navi Mumbai airport will have 2 parallel runways just like London`s Heathrow airport, which was built in the 1960s....

Seriously ?? Mumbai is putting up a plan which was used by the Brits 50 years ago, this clearly shows the lack of planning and management. Is Mumbai 50 years behind the United Kingdom?? Heathrow airport is operating at 98% capacity which means, newer airlines are not given additional landing slots. So if Mumbai has a new 2 runway airport then in just 10 years, because of tremendous demand, the airport will be operating at full capacity and there shall be need for a third airport, which shall take again 2 decades of planning and construction.

Seeing the forecast, it seems that Mumbai actually needs a 4 parallel runway airport just like the one in Los Angeles Airport (LAX), because Mumbai is in the centre of Europe Africa, Asia and Australian sub-continent, which means if there is infrastructure, foreign airlines may consider it as their secondary hub also. This location could act as an onward connection for flights between Europe-Australia, Africa-China, Gulf-Far East & a lot of other combinations.

Mumbai Airport fared far better than most of the other airport in the Asian sub-continent a couple decades ago, but now even underdeveloped economies like Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines have better planning and better airports to give their economy a boost, seems like the planners have not thought the process all the way through.

An important lesson which we can learn is that Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and other gulf cities have all got huge just because they focused really well in the aviation business, they literally stole the charm from the European airports by planning and operating better. Another example to consider is the Suvarnabhumi airport of Bangkok, currently they are working on a 2 runway system, but they reserved enough space to construct a total 5 runways, a country like Thai is setting the priorities right.

Mumbai, a city which never sleeps, is actually sleeping in the Aviation department, and lesser aviation business means, hurting the local economy, AAI, do something, Mumbai is the Los Angeles of India.