Bidding opens for 3rd İstanbul airport, slated to be world’s largest

İstanbul entered the race to build the world’s largest airport on Thursday, as bidding began on a 150-million passenger capacity airport which officials hope will make the city a gateway for world air travel.
Speaking to the press in Ankara on Wednesday, Transportation Minister Binalı Yıldırım said the massive airport tender would likely amount to around $8.7 billion and see the airport built within an ambitious four years. “Today the number of air passengers is more than four times İstanbul’s population. We cannot expand Atatürk airport, and must expand İstanbul’s airport capacity through a new airport, the world’s largest,” the minister was quoted by the Anatolia news agency as saying.
The massive planned capacity of 150 million annual flyers will indeed make the airport the largest in the world — or at least challenge regional rival Dubai, which was the largest air hub in the Middle East in 2012 with nearly 60 million flyers, according to Reuters. İstanbul currently carries a similar number of passengers, said Yıldırım, who estimated that Atatürk Airport carried 45 million passengers last year while Sabiha Gökçen International Airport carried around 15 million.
The new airport will be constructed on İstanbul’s European side between the Black Sea regions of Yeniköy and Akpinar, an area where the Environment and Urban Planning Ministry is also planning to build “İstanbul Metropolitan,” a massive, 1.5 million person satellite city. Yıldırım said the airport would be a vital part of İstanbul Metropolitan, creating an estimated 120,000 jobs.
Yıldırm told reporters that contractors will be bidding on a 25-year build-and-operate contract for the airport, with firms competing on design, development costs and the price of annual rent they are willing to pay the State Airports Authority (DHMI). Though Yıldırım suggested early last year that the project would cost around $5.6 billion, a more recent figure for the project has been $8.7 billion. That figure would make it the most expensive development project in the city’s history.
Interested bidders so far include TAV Airports Holding, Turkey’s leading airport operator, Limak Holding, which manages Sabiha Gökçen airport, and Alarko Holding. The deadline for bid submission is April 5, a Turkish official told Reuters on Wednesday.
İstanbul isn’t the only city aiming to be the world’s largest air hub, however, with Dubai claiming that it will see a record-breaking 75 million passengers by 2015 and 98 million by 2020. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) Airline Industry Forecast for 2012-2016 estimates that there may be plenty of passengers to go around in coming years, predicting that global air traffic will grow by 28.5 percent to accommodate 500 million more passengers globally by 2016.
Airlines in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are already vying for a growing portion of that air traffic with national and discount carriers in both countries expanding international services and reporting record profits. Emirates Airline reported in November of last year that its profits doubled in the first six months of 2012 over that period in 2011. National carrier Turkish Airlines meanwhile saw passenger volume rise by 20 percent in 2012 and greatly expanded the range of its international flights last year, especially in Africa. Turkish discount carrier Pegasus Airlines meanwhile purchased an unprecedented $12 billion in Airbus planes late last year