New airport director P Su00a0R K Sudhakar talks about his plans for expansion

The city airport has gone through a lot of changes in the past few months, and after the opening of two arrival and departure termini, it expects more business. Newly appointed airport director P S R K Sudhakar is confident that with the existing building, which can accommodate more than 900 people, they can handle more flights.

"As far as the building and facilities are concerned, we are capable of handling more passengers. After we opened the entire building, we are able to accommodate more people," Sudhakar said.

A major hurdle to increasing the number of flights is that the Indian Air Force has allotted a specific time slot for the operation of the airport.

"We are not able to use the runway for six hours because the Indian Air Force has its daily drills," he said. "Even though we want more flights to touch the city, we can not operate the airport beyond the given time slot."

He said that during night hours, the airport has the capacity to have eight flights parked, and every day around seven flights get parked.

"The slot between 12.30 am and 6 am is free. But domestic flights do not function because of the odd hours. So it's the international flight that we can target," he said.

He said he wanted to work on more areas. "My aim is to make optimum use of the space available for the benefit of the passengers. We are also planning to build an administrative block besides the main building so that we can move there and can give away this area for office space to airlines," he said. "Many private jets are parked on the premises, but the owners want hangars and so we are planning to build them."

On the new airport planned at Chakan, he said. "We will have to make the best of the resources we have right now because building an airport takes time," he said.