VN increases airport capacity

At the third Annual South East Asia Airport Expansion Summit in the capital city on August 25, Vu Pham Nguyen An, Deputy Director of the Airport Operation Department under the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) offered to participants key expansion projects in Vietnam.

He said the projects were being carried out in six airports across the country, including two major airports here and in HCM City.

Noppen, an international company facilitating business across Asia and Europe, organised the two-day summit, where government officials joined airport owners and operators, airlines, financiers and consultants in discussing global trends and coming up with strategies and partnerships to efficiently expand airports in the region.

According to An, the construction of Terminal 2 (T2) of the NoiBai International Airport is scheduled to be completed by year-end and is expected to serve 10 million to 15 million passengers per year by 2020.

After 2020, the Government will determine whether to proceed with T3 and T4 to increase the airport's capacity to 50 million passengers per year.

Other projects include the expansion and upgrade of the domestic terminal and the expansion of the international terminal (T2) of Tan Son Nhat International Airport in HCM City.

The domestic terminal will be enlarged to 40,048 square meters and will handle 113,000 flight movements and 15 million passengers per year.

The first phase of the project was completed and made fully operational last April 21, and the other phases are expected to be finished by the beginning of 2015.

For its T2 expansion project, ACV will expand the left and right wing of the international terminal, adding 40 check-in counters and two waiting halls to increase capacity to 13 million passengers per year.

An said the company was also implementing repair and expansion projects in international airports such as Cam Ranh in KhanhHoa Province and Cat Bi in Haiphong City, and in local airports such as Vinh in Nghe An Province and ThoXuan in ThanhHoa Province.

He also cited the plan to construct Long Thanh International Airport, a hub in the Southeast Asian region, in Dong Nai Province's Long Thanh District.

"The airport will handle 100 million passengers and five million tonnes of freight per year. The airport project will be submitted to the National Assembly for approval this October," An said.

ManomayRai, General Manager of GMR Airport, shared the experience of New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, which has been operated by the Delhi International Airport Limited, a public-private partnership (PPP), since 2006.

Rai said Vietnam could consider using the PPP model in the airport industry. For example, if there were two international airports in the region, the government could manage one and a private enterprise could operate the other. According to Rai, the most important thing will be to have a clear policy for managing airports.