Page 20 - bne_newspaper_November_16_2018

Opinion
November 16, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
“80 Eiffel Towers!”
“[The Istanbul Airport] defies the world with
its size...” according to the official website of
the consortium behind it, IGA. “Istanbul New Airport well overrides its competitors with its size. Istanbul New Airport, 3.5 times as big as Peking Airport made up of 23 million square meters...,” IGA continues, adding: “New Istanbul Airport is worth 80 Eiffel Towers!”
Eighty Eiffel Towers, as it turns out, could be constructed with the 640,000 tonnes of steel used in the construction of this mega-infrastructure. But hold on a minute, there’s a danger here that we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves, for the current constructed size of Erdogan’s “largest” airport would be as questionable as the realness of Potemkin’s village if the global media had not turned into a post-truth PR machine.
Its first commercial flight departed on October 31, reportedly with 340 passengers on board bound for Ankara. By now, a total of five daily reciprocal flight routes should be up and running, including to Ankara, Antalya and Izmir, along with a connection to Azerbaijani capital Baku and one to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
All the flights are operated by Turkey’s state- controlled national flag carrier Turkish Airlines (THY). THY denied on November 2 in a bourse filing a claim in Turkish daily Hurriyet made on October 31 that it has taken action to acquire a stake in the new airport.
The construction of Istanbul Airport began in May 2015 and according to Bianet the target is to have all phases online by 2023, a year which in October brings the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey.
Erdogan, meanwhile, announced on September 16 that he was freezing new government investment projects in a fiscal squeeze seen as a response to the country’s economic turmoil. Infrastructure mega-projects to build bridges, ports, tunnels and railways — the likes of which
have been symbolic of the outspoken Erdogan’s attempt to transform Turkey in the past 15 years, but which have been highly debt-fuelled — could be suspended under the move, with the president himself stating that only those which were more than 70% complete would be finished.
Currently, Istanbul Airport includes only the world’s “largest” terminal space. Its first three runways are designed to serve 100mn passengers annually by 2021, while there is a target of 200mn using six runways by 2029 — almost double the capacity of the world’s busiest airport in 2017, Atlanta.
“Pininfarina and AECOM, an outstanding design company that designed for Ferrari previously, designed the 90-metre-tall control tower of Istanbul New Airport,” according to IGA.
Question marks over functionality
The functionality of Erdogan’s “largest” airport project is also inviting some pesky question marks. Though named Istanbul Airport, it is located 20 miles outside of the city on the coast of the Black Sea.
The only public transportation linking to the air- port currently comprises of six bus lines operated by Istanbul Municipality’s transportation units Havaist and IETT. A metro line extending to the airport is targeted for November 2019, Cigdem Toker, wrote on October 5 in her column for dai- ly Sozcu, citing a 2017 state audit court report.
The plan is to transfer all flights presently operating out of Ataturk Airport — Europe’s fifth largest airport by traffic in 2017 — to the new airport by the end of this year.
Ataturk processed 64.1mn passengers in
2017, according to data from the state airports authority (DHMI). Those more than 60mn passengers will presumably be able to reach the successor airport by private car, bus or taxi.
Ozgur Ozdemir and Batu Bozkurk of Medyacope TV on October 31 released a video story about their journey from Istanbul to the first commercial flight