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Suvarnabhumi Airport to reduce bottlenecks

Originally published on www.businesstraveller.asia 04/10/2011 - Filed under: News »

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Long and tedious waits at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok will hopefully become a thing of the past as the airport transforms its security checkpoints.

The new centralised security checkpoints currently being installed and scheduled to be complete by March next year will double the number of screening machines from 16 to 30, states local newspaper Bangkok Post. This is predicted to reduce significant amounts of wait time as it would handle 7,200 passengers per hour, up from the present 3,840.

The new facilities will be located on the fourth floor of the eastern and western wings of the airport.

The measure is a quick and temporary solution to easing passenger traffic at the busy airport before the expansion project announced last year for a new satellite terminal overcomes bureaucratic roadblocks and officially gets off the ground (see story here). The new project is expected to raise passenger capacity to 60 million annually.

Acting president of Airports of Thailand (AoT), Nirandra Theeranartsin, said: “These are short-term measures taken to enable us to cope with rising congestion until the expansion is ready in the next several years.”

Bangkok's main international airport is nearing saturation point as it was initially built with the capacity to handle 45 million passengers annually and is currently already clocking almost 40 million passengers every year.

For more information, visit www.suvarnabhumiairport.com

Alisha Haridasani

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COMMENTS » 

wisi1965 - 04/10/2011 15:27

Bangkok Post says the passenger traffic has already exceeded 47 Mio

"Passenger traffic for the fiscal year, which ended last month, exceeded 47 million. The airport was designed to handle 45 million a year, said Airports of Thailand Plc (AoT), the majority state-owned airport operator."

SiamAir - 05/10/2011 01:26

The bottleneck is not in the security checkpoint, but through immigration procedures. Therefore this will not solve the problems of long waits at Suvarnabhumi.

Once again this is only a thai way of pretending to solve a problem, but in fact they don't.

aeronautic - 06/10/2011 11:39

I tend to agree with SiamAir's view, Immigration prodedures is still the same as of the 80's, when Bangkok Intl. Airport was located in Don Muang Airport, but now the officer are equipped with monitor screen wired to the main frame. This old fashion way needs to be overhauled, otherwise delay will remained unsolved.

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