Goa chief minister Pramod Sawant on Tuesday said flights will start landing at Mopa International Airport from September 1, 2022. However, the inauguration date is yet to be finalised.
Sawant said 98 percent of the work on the airport has been completed. The proposed date for commissioning of the first phase of Mopa Airport is August 15, 2022. Goa’s only existing airport in Dabolim is located inside the defence base INS Hansa, which is owned by the Indian Navy.
The state government had initially given September 2020 as the deadline for commissioning of the estimated Rs 3,000 crore airport project after GMR Group won bids for the development and operations of the aerodrome in 2016, beating state-run Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Essel Infra-Incheon.
The new airport, which under the concession agreement offers 232 acres of land for commercial cityside development for a period of 60 years, would have a capacity to handle 30 million passengers annually once fully operational.
The existing airport at Dabolim, which was designed to handle 50 lakh passengers per year, has far exceeded its capacity and AAI has already embarked on an expansion plan to increase the capacity to 1.30 crore passengers per annum by 2022.
The concession period for the greenfield project will be 40 years with a possible extension of another 20 years through a bid process. The airport will be built under the BOT (Build Operate Transfer) model. The regulatory regime for the concession will be a hybrid with 30 percent cross-subsidy.
Under the hybrid model, only up to 30 percent of the non-aeronautical revenues, which include segments like retail, food and beverages and parking, would be used for the cross-subsidisation of aeronautical charges. Aeronautical charges include those related to route and terminal navigation services.
