(Story updated on August 23 with further information on reopening plans)
Flood-ravaged Cochin International Airport (CIAL) in Kochi, India, will resume operations starting August 29, three days later than it had earlier expected, airport authorities said Thursday.
Earlier in the week reconstruction started at the airport following the worst floods the southern Indian state of Kerala has experienced in a century. Cochin International, the largest airport in the state, had suspended all flight operations as long as essential facilities such as runways, taxiways, and apron remain submerged. Although by Thursday flood waters had nearly subsided, more needed work to infrastructure than anticipated and challenges associated with mobilizing manpower forced a three-day delay to the opening. More than 90 percent of airport personnel and employees of companies serving the facility had left the city of Kochi due to the floods.
“It is possible for CIAL to start limited operations using smaller aircraft during the day using visual flight rules,” Vishok Mansingh, CEO of Indian regional carrier TruJet, told AIN. “They can also set up a temporary fencing given that the perimeter wall is broken. A similar operation was carried out at Chennai too when it experienced similar flooding a few years ago.”
The Indian navy has provided emergency services, reopening a military airport in the center of town to host flights by commercial carriers using ATR turboprops to provide relief support and fly out stranded residents. Meanwhile, CIAL provides terminal management services to the navy. Air India subsidiary Alliance Air on August 20 landed the first airplane at the facility, the INS Garuda navy base. The navy has converted an open hangar as a relief shelter with a makeshift roof at the base, which hosted civilian flights until it closed in 2000.
The ministry of civil aviation said it would watch to ensure that airfares do not exceed a prescribed limit.
As water levels receded to a level of about one foot on August 21, several challenges persisted. Cleaning operations had gotten under way, but the terminal lost essential equipment including baggage belts and computers to the floods. Damage to the airport’s solar panels remained unclear. CIAL is the world’s first airport fully powered by solar energy.
Meanwhile, Cochin’s 11,000-foot-long, 150-foot-wide wide Code E runway requires milling works. The size of the area that needs milling, the standards required for the stabilization work, and the short time frame call for experienced personnel and the right equipment. Crews must remove, refit, and test almost all of the 800 runway lights and reconstruct the airport’s 8,500-foot perimeter wall, which lay virtually destroyed.
CIAL provides international connectivity primarily to the Persian Gulf states, host to a large number of itinerant Indian workers. Known as an efficiently run airport under India’s Private Public Partnership model with many expatriate Indian shareholders in the Middle East, the airport encompasses an aircraft maintenance center and training academy.
All of India’s domestic carriers serve CIAL, as do Gulf carriers Emirates, Etihad, Kuwait Airways, Jazeera, FlyDubai, and Air Arabia, as well as Malaysia’s Air Asia. As a result of Cochin’s closure, Kerala’s second busiest airport--Trivandrum Airport--has absorbed much of the excess traffic.