Bengaluru International Airport runs out of gates to accomodate widebody flights
Last night, as Easter Sunday came to an end, a traffic jam began at Bengaluru International Airport (BIA), which exposed the weakness of hav...


This rush requires accurate scheduling, and provides the airport operators BIAL very little leeway in handling exceptions, as demonstrated last night.
Singapore Airlines flight SQ502 from Singapore to Bangalore which normally arrives at 21:50 was delayed by two hours and arrived at 23:45. By the time SQ arrived, the other gates were occupied with the Air France, Thai, Malaysia, and Lufthansa flights. As the picture below shows, the SQ flight was forced to park at a "non-contact" stand i.e. with no aerobridge connection to the passenger terminal building. I do not even want to hazard a guess on where the Air India and Tiger Airways flights were accommodated. Incidentally, if you see the large version of the image, the aircraft is 9V-SYL a Boeing 777-300 instead of the normal 777-200 operated by Singapore Airlines to Bangalore.

It raises an interesting point of discussion. Keeping in view the Rs. 1070 (approx $21.40) User Development Fee international passengers pay, which, by the way, is almost 400% more than domestic passengers, is it not incumbent on the airport operators to create adequate infrastructure to provide leeway for exceptional situations like last night ? or provide adequate buffer capacity for future growth ? On the flip side, creating infrastructure for a potential situation that occurs very rarely, or growth which may take time to come, could be considered unneeded and wasteful.
What do you think? Please share your views via a comment.
For more photos visit my Flickr site.