The Airports Authority of Jamaica (AAJ) is working to increase traffic in and out of the Ian Fleming International Airport (IFIA), in Boscobel, St Mary.
In an interview with JIS News, AAJ President and CEO, Audley Deidrick, explained that this will be achieved by significantly improving the existing facilities.
This, he said, is being done on the recommendation of international Transport Engineering and Consultancy firm, INECO.
Deidrick noted that the initial plans for the further expansion of the airport had been to do a 700-foot extension of the runway, which would take it across the road to the shoreline.
He pointed out that in doing the necessary investigations, it was discovered that there may be some challenges.
“That shoreline has a very steep fall, in addition to some bio-diversity, which we had to guard against destroying,” the CEO said.
“So, when you look at the cost to do that project, vis a vis, the impact or benefit it will create to generate more traffic at the airport, we put the matter through a master planning exercise through the consultants,” he added.
Deidrick explained that when the consultants completed the master plan, they agreed that the AAJ may eventually want to consider those grand expansion ideas, but for now, the existing facility has tremendous capability to generate significant traffic with minor alterations and build-outs.
It was against this background, the CEO said, that the AAJ halted its plans to undertake the major expansion work at this time, deciding to focus instead on a build-out of the existing facility.
He informed that IFIA has seen major upgrades since 2011, when it became an international airport “and subsequent to that, we had gone ahead and done further widening of the runway to accommodate the regulatory requirements for certain aircraft that we wanted to invite to operate there.”
Deidrick said that the terminal building has also been expanded to accommodate the requirements for international traffic and the separation of arriving and departing traffic, and domestic versus international traffic.
He also pointed out that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, an area has been established for the health processing of passengers to meet the protocols for travel.
Deidrick informed that a police post, for which ground was broken in August 2020, is also being established at the airport.
The police post is being erected through an agreement with the Ministry of National Security and the Jamaica Constabulary Force.
The CEO advised that if traffic growth is significant enough to warrant a further expansion to accommodate larger planes, which he said, would be quite an engineering challenge, the proposal for expansion across the road would be revisited.
He argued that IFIA can be “a small shining star of Jamaica’s airport system.”