Busy Kathmandu airport
Nepal has a single international airport, Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA). The three kilometre runway serves for domestic and international flights. It might be not a good idea to compare TIA with other busy international airports of the World in terms of air traffic but activities at TIA are growing every day. In World busiest airports landing and take off takes in less than two minutes (Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_traffic_movements). I was checking flight schedule at TIA and for that I visited different web sites to get the information. I find traffic updated information of flights at TIA from this site (http://www.flightstats.com/), which I could not get from the official site of TIA itself (http://www.tiairport.com.np/). While checking the flight movements, I was surprised to see that landing and take off is taking place in every 12 minutes at TIA. I calculated this time from the flights movement on 8th and 9th May 2008.
The airport starts its flight early morning (around 6:00AM) and lasts till mid night. There were no flights after mid night till six in the morning. Therefore, activities at this airport are only for 18 hours. On 8th May, there were 22 landings and 22 take offs as domestic flights where as there were 24 landings and 25 take offs as international flights. Similarly, on 9th May, there were 21 landings and 22 take offs as domestic flights where as there were 22 landings and 22 take offs as international flights. Hence, the total flights in two days were 179 which were taking place in 36 hours (No flight activities for six hours per day). Based on the statistics of two days, a plane is either landing or taking off in about 12 minutes. For a small airport and almost without transit routes to other countries, a flight activity in every 12 minutes shows that the airport is busy. With the peace and development activities in the country, the flights are supposed to increase in coming days.
The airport starts its flight early morning (around 6:00AM) and lasts till mid night. There were no flights after mid night till six in the morning. Therefore, activities at this airport are only for 18 hours. On 8th May, there were 22 landings and 22 take offs as domestic flights where as there were 24 landings and 25 take offs as international flights. Similarly, on 9th May, there were 21 landings and 22 take offs as domestic flights where as there were 22 landings and 22 take offs as international flights. Hence, the total flights in two days were 179 which were taking place in 36 hours (No flight activities for six hours per day). Based on the statistics of two days, a plane is either landing or taking off in about 12 minutes. For a small airport and almost without transit routes to other countries, a flight activity in every 12 minutes shows that the airport is busy. With the peace and development activities in the country, the flights are supposed to increase in coming days.
Comments