Renovation of country’s sole international airport Tribhuvan International airport (TIA) has been completed in time. The work of runway renovation has completed in time and the airport has resumed its 21 hour operation from today.
The base course and top course blacktopping of runway of 3050 meter runway completed by the deadline and the flight operation started early morning from Monday onward at TIA.
Air Transport Capacity Enhancement Project of Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) initiated the runway rehabilitation on April 1, 2019 (Chaitra 18) and the airport was closed for 10 hours a day from 10 PM to 8 AM for the three months from April 1 for the project.
China National Aero Technology International Engineering Corporation, Chinese Company held charge of the runway rehabilitation project of TIA. The agreement to rehabilitate the runway was signed on November 5, 2018 at cost of around NRs. 3.75 Billion.
TIA official stated that the contractor company completed the work on time with quality and now the airport has resumed its operation on old time table. Now the problem of potholes in runway has been eliminated and the runway will be able to operate for a decade without any problem, the official added.
The main layer of runway has been blacktopped by 20 centimeter and around 6.5 centimeter thick top layer has been added.
The airport will be operating for 21 hours for next 2 month and the airport will again partially halt the flight operation to rehabilitate the parallel taxiway and other remaining part. The taxiway rehabilitation process is scheduled to commence from September 1.
The airport will be closed for around 7 hours later while taxiway rehabilitation process commences and the airport authority stated that the flight will not be affected.
For the first time in the History of TIA, the runway of airport has been upgraded completely. TIA’s runway was built in 1975. As per the international standard, runways of international airports should be refurbished with the use of new bitumen every 10 years. TIA, however, has never done that and because of that the flight operations were affected mainly on monsoon season.
