Green light for B5.8bn Phuket Airport expansion
Phuket International Airport from the air. The recently completed Terminal 2 can be seen closest to the camera.
Phuket International Airport may have seen only a slight increase in passenger throughput last year, compared with 2007, but its owner, the Airports Authority of Thailand (AOT), clearly believes the global financial crisis will have no long-term effect on the island’s ability to attract ever-growing numbers of airlines and visitors.
The government in Bangkok plainly agrees – it has just approved a 5.8-billion-baht (US$175 million) plan to increase the airport’s capacity to 12.5 million passengers by 2018. This is on top of the recently completed second terminal, which increased capacity to 6.5 million passengers a year, at a cost of 516 million baht.
This year, the AOT expects the airport to accommodate 41,000 flights and about 6 million passengers, already close to terminal capacity. Part of the reason for this is the popularity of the airport – which charges lower landing fees than Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi – with low-cost carriers. One of these was Air Asia, which made Phuket a regional hub earlier this year, providing direct flights between the island and Vietnam, Indonesia and Hong Kong.
Under the plan, the current international terminal will become the domestic terminal building. Photo courtesy PhuketAirportOnline.com
The B5.8 billion budget will pay for the construction of more taxiways, 11 parking bays for aircraft, a new international passenger terminal, conversion of the existing international terminal into a domestic terminal, a new cargo building, new roads and improved transport systems, a parking garage for the international terminal, improvements in car parking areas, and a new airport office and airline offices. It will be funded entirely by revenue from the AOT, a listed company majority-owned by the state.
There is, however, no mention in the plan of an extension to the runway. Currently, all sizes of aircraft can land at Phuket, but the runway is too short for very large aircraft such as Boeing 747s and the new Airbus giant, the 380, to take off fully laden for long-haul flights.
Dovetailing with the airport expansion, but not part of the same budget, is the construction of a new road from the airport to Phuket Town. This has yet to receive government approval, but already many people who own land along its proposed route have donated parts of that land for the new road.
