Making a climb down from its rigid stance, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) has expressed its willingness to spend up to ₹1,000 crore for the expansion of Calicut international airport.

The new development comes in the wake of the decision taken at a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in Thiruvananthapuram early this week to acquire the required land for the expansion of the airport. Previously, the AAI had taken an adamant stand that the Centre would not incur any expense for the airport and that the State government would have to bear the cost.

Top sources told The Hindu here on Friday that the AAI would have to work out the minimum required land for the development of the airport that would allow the resumption of services of wide-bodied aircraft. The AAI officials, who held discussions with the Chief Minister, were convinced that acquiring vast quantity of land would run into trouble with residents and cause environmental havoc.

An earlier proposal was to acquire 485 acres of land. But this has been scaled down to 248 acres, including 80 acres for rehabilitating the evicted families. ‘‘Possibly we may require about 170 acres of land for airport expansion and the AAI will subsequently do the land filling,’’ a senior official said.

A report prepared by AAI (executive director - operations) J.P. Alex, AAI (architect) S. Biswas and Director General of Civil Aviation (joint director general) J.S Rawat said the construction of embankment for filling the valley on the runway, extension work and widening the existing runway strip involved 515 lakh cubic metres of earthwork.

The AAI has projected the requirement of 24,000 cubic metres of sand per day continuously with minimum deployment of 2,400 truck loads at 100 trucks per hour. In addition to this, the AAI would need a dedicated access road from sand source to the construction site, sources said.

It is learnt that the District Collectors of Kozhikode and Malappuram have been asked to identify hills for land-filling purposes. However, the first priority is to initiate procedures to begin operations of Boeing 777-200 aircraft at the airport as soon as possible. That will reduce the runway to 2,700 m from the existing 2,850 m so as to increase the Runway End Safety Area (RESA), sources said.

THE HINDU

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