Tribhuvan International Airport presently holds nine parking bay in its vicinity four out of which is for loading wide body and big sized aircraft and the other five for small and narrow size aircraft.
The nine parking bays at international air gateway of TIA gets damaged by increasing flights. To ease the congestion at international parking bays, Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal has decided to add 13 new international parking bays within next three years duration, 2022 to lease the pain of current parking bays.
According to a statement from TIA authority, among 13 parking bays, four parking bays will be constructed by the funds of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) and rest nine will be assembled under the TIA Air Capacity Enhancement Project funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
The four parking bays which will be built by CAAN is scheduled to be completed within this year while the parking bay under the ADB project will be completed by 2020 said Babu Ram Poudel, Chief of the project.
“The invitation for tender to carry out the soil filling works on the northern part of the airport where the nine parking bays will be constructed will begin after two months,” he said.
The design of parking bays is not completed. “As per the initial plan, if the parking bays are constructed smaller than the number of projected bays will reach12 by increasing additional three”
CAAN broke the project into four different packages after the Spanish contractor Constructora Sanjose that had been entrusted with the TIA Air Transport Capacity Enhancement Project was sent off for non-performance in December last year.
Among four packages, CAAN has already signed project contract for packages 1 and 2. The works under package 1 include extending the southern end of the runway by 300 meters and building a drainage system and perimeter and access roads. The duration of Package 1 is 21 months. Package 2 includes construction of an international airport terminal building including associated works.
CAAN is planning to sign a project contract for package 3 within this month which includes construction of a sewage treatment system and installation of a power supply system. Packages 2 and 3 will last 18 and 12 months respectively.
In terms of duration and time, the soil filling in the northern part of the airport is the major component of the project. Lastly, the project had only been able to supply only 6, 00,000 cubic meters of soil out of the 2 million cubic meters required for the expansion works. To avoid the same problem, the project has planned to invite separate bids for the soil filling works. The TIA has witnessed a solid growth in passenger traffic in the first half of 2017, setting the stage for receiving a record number of flyers this year.
TIA data shows that 1.87 million passengers passed through the airport in the first six months of 2017, up 12.79 percent compared to the same period last year.
Aircraft movement also grew by 31.86 percent to 16,469 flights, a solid increase primarily due to Chinese airlines raising flight frequencies to Nepal. Currently 28 international airlines serve Kathmandu.
