Avoid being stampeded into Mopa Philip S. Thomas
Some useful details of the ICAO report about Dabolim and Mopa have appeared elsewhere in the local English media recently. Ostensibly the report is, indeed, about the two airports together. In fact, it acknowledges that both airports may be needed on "social and economic grounds" but is silent on the issue of the government's political credibility since the latter has openly backed the idea of a two-airport tango with little or no clue as to how to proceed. But the report confirms our worst fears that Goa is sought to be stampeded into going in for the old Mopa project in an unjustified way. The signs are clearly visible in a series of surprising conceptual flaws in the ICAO's approach. First and foremost, ICAO neglects to address the issue of the Union Cabinet' s Resolution 2000 which mandates the closure of Dabolim civil enclave once Mopa is functional. Ostensibly based on the 150 km separation rule, this resolution may have been at the instance of the military under the guise of enhancing the viability of a greenfield airport project for private developers. The rule originated in 1997 with (a) the new Kochi airport (to bypass the physically constrained naval runway on an island there) and (b) the negotiations then underway over a new Bangalore airport (given the inadequacies of the existing HAL civil enclave). The rule is currently under active review and may be relaxed across the board. Goa should monitor the outcome closely before jumping onto the ICAO plan. But Resolution 2000 will be an obstacle till it is reworked. The next flaw is in the use of the term "dual airport system" in conjunction with the gratuitous warning about the commercial and financial risks of "splitting air traffic". The issue arises if both Dabolim and Mopa are considered as "international airports". This was the source of the original plan for Mopa, designed as a replacement for Dabolim, not as a supplement. Once it was clear that both airports need to co-exist, ICAO should have recast the plan for Mopa in 2006 to function as a smaller regional airport (albeit with the vision and design provisions for modular enlargement over time according to traffic growth). Instead it still talks of a $325 million project (up 40% from $225 million in 2005) even though capacity has supposedly been halved (from nearly 12 million to 6 million). In India it is easy to fall into the trap of "dual airports" because the pent up demand for airport infrastructure induces us to think that every new airport has to be an international airport. But in the rest of the world every new airport is not an international airport from Day One. The distinction usually applied is between "primary airports" and "secondary airports" which, therefore, constitute "multi-airport systems". For vital historical and practical reasons, Dabolim must be retained by Goa as a primary airport to the maximum extent possible and Mopa should be designed as a secondary airport, at least at the outset. In this connection, it is unfair for ICAO to single out the Goa government for preparing an "airport development strategy" while overlooking the role of its client, the civil aviation ministry at the Centre. But it is a good wake up call to all of us in Goa if the state is to avoid being stampeded in unwanted directions. Goa cannot expect others to divine its fundamental interests in aviation without participating pro-actively in the planning process. ICAO missed out on all the necessary parameters because it got side-tracked by the nominal military element of Dabolim. It is "plane wrong" in saying that "the primary use of Dabolim is for military purposes". On the contrary, the Navy never misses an opportunity to play to the gallery by (a) proudly proclaiming that it uses "only 16%" of weekly runway time for purely military purposes and (b) suggesting that congestion could be easily reduced if airlines made use of all the night hours. This inadvertently confirms that Dabolim was originally a civilian airport and still continues to be primarily a civilian facility even though it is controlled by the military since Liberation. It is a sheep in wolf's clothing. The fallacy in the Navy's stance is that all hours are the same. In fact the hours blocked by the Navy are peak (morning) hours for national air traffic. What are available to airlines at Goa are mostly off-peak hours (in the afternoon) and non-peak hours (at night). The latter may be useful only for international airlines from the west and for domestic low cost carriers (if concessional airport rates and low ATF sales taxes are charged). Indeed it should be useful to the Navy itself though it has lost many aircraft , (for unspecified reasons), while "training" during broad daylight! But that's another story. The last straw in the ICAO's approach is that it has got carried away by the challenge of "financing" the Mopa project. This is the back end of the process not the front end. It follows from the physical plan and should not dictate it. According to the well-known GIGO principle of computerized financial modeling, if you put "garbage in" you get "garbage out"! It's as simple as that. Once you decide on a multi-airport system, the traffic growth projections currently applicable, the destinations to be served in a non-overlapping way, the state's development strategy etc, then the financing requirements may turn out to be not so humungous after all. Indeed the state itself may feel the need to shoulder the burden given the onerous and often unreasonable demands of both the opaque military (at Dabolim) and mercenary private developers if any (at Mopa). To give the devil its due, ICAO does make eminent sense when it says that "going ahead (with Mopa) is necessary despite the importance of the currently planned investment programme at the Dabolim airport". But in order to follow this superficially sound advice, the Mopa project must be made feasible and viable as a supplement to Dabolim without pre-judging the financing aspects. This requires a lot of actual spade work, not pre-conceived solutions. When ICAO observes at the very end that "only a detailed financial analysis could better quantify the real potential viability of the project while establishing the optimum investment required from the state government to make it a win-win proposition." it must first go back to the drawing boards about the real project. Anyone in Goa would say "amen" to the idea of a "win-win proposition" if it means that both Dabolim and Mopa must win out in the long run. Published in Herald Dec 29,'07 as "Avoid stampede in Mopa".
