Istanbul’s new airport will be built on filled land

ANKARA – Hürriyet Daily News

Location of the Istanbul's new airport. Hürriyet photo

Istanbul’s third airport, scheduled to be built in northern Istanbul, will be constructed on old coal mines that will be filled in, the transport minister said yesterday during a Parliament session on the 2013 budget.

Binali Yıldırım said the exact location of the new airport was somewhere between the Yeniköy and Akpınar villages on the outskirts of Istanbul, near the Black Sea.

It will be one of the largest airports in the world on 90 million square meters of land, Anatolia news agency quoted the minister as saying.

The mine cavities, up to 100 meters deep, will be filled, and a modern airport will be built.

The new airport will have five or six runways and a passenger capacity of 100 million in the short term, which will be increased to 150 million, Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbaş said late last month.

The capacity of Atatürk International Airport, the largest in the country, has a capacity of 34 million passengers annually.

Yıldırım had said earlier that once finished the new facility would become the main airport in the city, with Atatürk continuing to serve for smaller operations.

Atatürk is today the major hub of Turkish Airlines, the national flag carrier, which has been aggressively growing in recent years.

Turkish Airlines increased its net profits in the first nine months of the year to 868 million Turkish Liras, 665 percent up from the same period a year earlier.