Ministry to hold tender for third Istanbul airport

ISTANBUL- Hürriyet Daily News

Passengers go through security control at Istanbul’s Atatürk International Airport. A new airport planned for Istanbul will have the capacity to hold 100 million people. AA photo

Turkish Transportation Minister Binal Yıldırım said on April 21 that the government was planning to open a tender for the construction of a third airport in Istanbul.

Yıldırım said Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport was currently functioning at double its capacity, because of ongoing renovations and capacity restructuring at the airport.

“We are directing some flights to other airports, and we will provide more opportunities for scheduled flights,” Yıldırım told reporters in Istanbul.

He said these were short or medium-term measures to relieve traffic at the airport.

100 million capacity
“We will hold a tender for the construction of a third airport in Istanbul within this year,” Yıldırım added.
At the opening of the Trump Towers Mall in Istanbul on April 19, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan first announced that the government planned to build a new airport, capable of holding 100 million people, in Turkey’s largest city.

Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport hosted 20.3 million international passengers and had international commercial flight traffic of around 178,817 in 2010. These figures were 11.8 million and 94,887 respectively for domestic traffic. The airport hosted more than 36 million passengers in 2011, according to Yıldırım.

Noting that delays are becoming more frequent at the Atatürk Airport, Minister Yıldırım said, the daily flights at the facility have already started exceeding 1,000.

“Building a new runway here is not the solution,” Yıldırım said. “The cost of a planned parallel runway is 5 billion Turkish Liras.

The ministry was also working on renewing parking to ease the traffic, he also said. “Some of the delays are related with that,” he said. The airport operator is working on a new parking area at the military plot nearby. The construction work there is about to finish, the minister also said.