Plans to improve Vizag airport ranking

The AAC requested the Airport Director to work out a detailed plan towards improving the ranking.

Visakhapatnam: The need for making efforts to improve the position of Visakhapatnam airport globally to enable it to find place in the top 30 airports in the world was underscored at the Airport Advisory Committee meeting here on Wednesday.

At present, Visakhapatnam is ranked 66 while Hamad airport at Doha in Qatar is no. 1, Visakhapatnam MP,MVV Satyanarayana who chaired the meeting said. The AAC requested the Airport Director to work out a detailed plan towards improving the ranking.

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The meeting also referred to the decision of the Navy to shut down the airport operations from 9 p.m. to 8 a.m. from November this year to April 2024 for runway maintenance and urged the MP to take up the matter with the Defence Minister and Civil Aviation Minister to consider curtailing operations from 11 p.m. to 7 p.m. instead.

The members O. Naresh Kumar, Dr. K. Kumar Raja and D.S. Varma, expressed satisfaction over the occupancy rate of flights which over 90 percent to Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and over 80 per cent with respect to Chennai and Kolkata, and called for taking steps to add more flights to each of the destinations.

They noted that the air cargo operations in India which were now handled only by Indigo would soon be run by Omega Enterprises which is expected to commence operations from November 10.

The meeting also discussed international air cargo operations. The facility was awarded to the AAI subsidiary Allied Services Co Ltd. which is likely to start its operations in a month as all the infrastructure is already in place.