As the international aviation market starts to develop into its senior years, their's competition brewing up globally to become the next biggest aviation hub in different parts of the world - one of them, being NIIA (New Istanbul International Airport). Do they pose a liability to airports such as Dubai?
Concept of what NIIA would look like after construction
Turkey has seemed to step up its game within the aviation industry. First with putting a mark on the airline industry with a profitable, Turkish Airlines. Then, improving its airport services to maximise space and profits. What else could you do to increase your dominance within the industry? - bid to create a 6 runway, modern and internationally competitive hub airport. Not forgetting the biggest world duty free in the world.
Extremely renowned airports such as Heathrow Airport and Dubai International are global players within the airport market. But, maximising profits with only two runways is starting to come to its end. NIIA, having 6 have already dramatically expanded their airport capability - to have a comfortable leverage of having major expansions during the airports lifetime. With Heathrow having to go through so much trouble to get a third runway, is there long left until its reputation depletes with NIIA taking leverage from the runway capability of current international airports - it’s inevitable that the 6-runway plan will benefit NIIA immensely,
The architecture of the airport is immensely beautiful - a real boost in the main source of generation of income, customer experience. The iconic new control tower presenting a tulip inspired structure that Aecom and Pininfarina had successfully won to build in an international bid.
Concept of what the Aecom and Pininfarina tulip inspired control will look like
Another huge boost of income for all airports is through a common service that they all provide - retail. IGA (Istanbul Grand Airport), the company leading the construction visualised how to maximise geographical space, but, also, profitability by creating the world’s largest world duty free and also a 150 million passenger capacity annually is the perfect formula of maximising profits to a new high. With Heathrow making £439 million in revenue just from retail.
IGA's CEO is Yusuf Akcayoglu, who also lead the development of the New Doha Airport, Muscat International Airport and King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh. This is the world’s largest airport project encompassing four phases, with the first to complete in the end of 2018 with 3 runways, a terminal covering one point three million meters squared, a seven hundred-thousand-meter square carpark with crucial dedicated on-site facilities - the end of phase four expected in 2028. It shows how dedicated investors are in bringing the brightest and intellectual people within the airline market to really accelerate the potential of NIIA, with Turkish Airlines backing the progress and Turkey's business district seeing it as a huge boost to Turkeys economical image - it’s really now just about waiting to see if the card Turkey is playing now, acts out the way they planned it to do so already sending massive shockwaves of risk to major gulf & middle eastern airports. If it does, we could be seeing a new dawn of international travel as other airports prepare to compete - in what way? Only time will tell.