AAI to spend Rs 20,000 cr in 5 yrs to upgrade, build airports

AAI had revenues of Rs 12,542 cr in FY17 against Rs 10,824 cr in the previous fiscal year

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) plans spend Rs 20,000 crore in the next five years to upgrade existing and build new airports across the country.

“Airlines have given a rough estimate: They will add about 200 planes in the near future. So we are also planning to ramp up capacity,” said AAI Chairman Guruprasad Mohapatra.

Budget airline SpiceJet ordered 100 planes last week. GoAir confirmed an order for 72 planes a few days before that. Indian airlines have ordered more than 700 planes. Some are adding as many as two planes a month.

“We’ll be spending Rs 2,500 crore in the next financial year. In 2016-17, capital expenditure was Rs 2,000 crore,” Mohapatra, an IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, had said.

The AAI had revenues of Rs 12,542 crore in FY17 against Rs 10,824 crore in the previous fiscal year. Profit also went up by 22.8 per cent to Rs 3,115.93 crore. However, a significant portion of the profit was from revenue sharing at Delhi and Mumbai airports.

Much of this will be utilised to expand a dozen of the 125 airports AAI manages.

Passenger traffic is expected to rise 17 per cent to 261 million this fiscal year, AAI said, adding aircraft movements would increase 15 per cent over the previous year.

AAI has asked all major domestic airlines — Air India, SpiceJet, Jet Airways, IndiGo, GoAir, and Vistara — to give it estimates of how many hangars and night-parking bays they will need in the coming years.

Night bays are airport areas where planes are parked at night. Hangars are used for maintenance work on planes. Airlines have said they want more bays than hangars.

“We are going to construct a lot of bays in the next financial year,” Mohapatra said.