About three weeks ago I had proposed a thought-experiment, a brain storming exercise regarding the Mopa airport project. The first step was to review an actual report about one of India's newly operational airports (Bangalore or Hyderabad) to see how it would fit with ideas about Mopa as presently being planned. The next step was to imagine what the story would be like if Mopa and Dabolim both operated in tandem for civilian flights (i.e. Dabolim civil enclave was NOT closed on some contractual basis and to all intents and purposes of the government it was expected to continue to function as before).
In yesterday's TOI, there was a report in which "UGDP's acting president accused the Congress leaders of fooling the Goans [with an offer] of keeping both airports operational. Such an offer cannot be accepted in the lighht of the fact that the old airports at Bangalore and Hyderabad are facing closure on inauguration of new airports". Let's ignore the point that UGDP is a bit behind times regarding Bangalore and Hyderabad airports since they are both already functionng and the old airports have in fact been closed in both places. But UGDPs idea about comparing and learning from Bangalore and Hyderabad is a good sign and one can build on it. Here is a recent report on Bangalore airport on which the proposed "two flights of fancy" exercise can be repeated. http://management.silicon.com/itdirector/0,39024673,39265482,00.htm <Bumpy landing for Bangalore's airport dream Leave three hours to get there. By Saritha Rai Published: 30 July 2008 11:28 BST There were high hopes for Bangalore's multimillion dollar air hub, which opened in May. But locating it in a near wilderness without a decent road was not a great start, says Saritha Rai....The new airport was first conceived 17 years ago, when Bangalore was not even a blip on the globalisation map. In the past decade, as the government dithered monumentally, the city has turned into a verb - being "Bangalored" means your job is being offshored - and air traffic to and from the city had grown some 300 per cent, far above initial projections. Dozens of multinationals such as Google, HSBC, IBM, Microsoft and Tesco have large operations in the city. This year, some 11 million passengers will fly in and out of the airport and the technology outsourcing industry will account for a chunk of that. Yet if air traffic growth has been fuelled by the business traveller, why is the new airport located in near wilderness, far from these businesses?...Certainly, the new facility is an improvement on the embarrassment that was Bangalore's old airport. In the words of a frequent traveller, it resembled a Greyhound bus station in a US town rather than an airport. The airport was so cramped that the wait to clear immigration and customs and to retrieve baggage was interminable. Travellers eventually found their way out, only to be hounded by private taxi operators who fell on them like a pack of wolves.> Some allowances may need to be made for the fact that Bangalore air traffic is business driven while Goa's is tourism driven (that too mostly domestic in numerical terms). But the issue of distance from South Goa beaches and hotels is analogous in an aviation sense to Bangalore and its Electronics City. The crucial question is what would the new Mopa airport look like if it is designed, built and operated to function in an economicall viable way alonside the old airport (Daboli civil enclave). Go ahead and think about it and if possible share your views. You can at least say you were not snoozing when Goa was set to go on the skids.
