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Dubai: Dubai International Airport (DIA) aims to handle 75 million passengers annually by 2015 and the emirate will continue with its multi-billion-dollar aviation infrastructure projects despite a global economic gloom, a senior official said on Thursday.
As part of the ongoing $7-billion expansion plan, DIA will open the swanky Terminal 3 for exclusive use by Emirates on Tuesday.
When the whole project is completed by 2011, the airport's passenger handling capacity will grow to 75 million, said Paul Griffiths, chief executive officer of Dubai Airports, the state-owned company that manages Dubai's airport facilities.
DIA, which is ranked 20th in the world by passenger numbers, will be operating to its full capacity within seven years, Griffiths told reporters during a tour of Terminal 3.
The new terminal will increase the airport's capacity to 60 million passengers a year from about 40 million now.
"The new Emirates Terminal 3 at Dubai International will make a significant contribution to the far-reaching strategic plan and the vision for Dubai's future," Shaikh Ahmad Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Civil Aviation and chairman and chief executive of Emirates Airline and Group, said in a statement.
The facility is expected to play a major role in the emirate;s goal of attracting 15 million tourists in 2015.
Emirates, which operates about 265 flights a day, will shift all its operations to the new facility by December in phases.
In the first phase starting from next week, all Emirates will move its GCC and Americas services, or 40 flights a day, to T3. In the second phase, all Middle East and Africa flights will be moved.
Services to Europe will be moved in the next phase, taking operations to 168 daily flights, or 60 per cent of all Emirates' services. The fourth and final phase will cover flights to South Asia, East Asia and Australasia.
Caution
Dubai Airports is keen to avoid the kind of troubles that hit London Heath-row's Terminal 5 opening in March when the baggage system failed and scores of flights were cancelled.
Griffiths said the T3 opening is being done in phases so that the airport is able to fix "glitches and bugs" without any disruption to services.
"In a complex facility like this, not everything will work as planned. We are being cautious," he said.
Dubai's ambition to be a major global aviation hub will see billions of dollars being invested in airport infrastructure over the next few years.
The centrepiece of this ambition is Al Maktoum International Airport in Jebel Ali that will start functioning next year.
The Jebel Ali airport is part of the $33-billion aviation and logistics hub called Dubai World Central. It will have a capacity of between 120 million to 150 million passengers and 12 million tonnes of cargo per year when fully developed.
Asked if Dubai will end up creating overcapacity, especially in the light of the current global economic slowdown, Griffiths said: "This is a very long-term investment proposition and to interrupt it because of some blips in the financial markets would be a mistake."
He insisted that air travel has seen continuous growth and "we are going to have to build the airport infrastructure at the rate we are currently building to keep pace with that overall growth".
Griffiths said that in other parts of the world, people have "regretted" abandoning airport expansion plans because those projects later had to be completed at a much higher cost.
"Airports that have panicked and stopped investments at times when traffic has dropped suddenly have almost universally regretted that. So our strategy is to remain on course and to continually invest to expand both capacity and the quality of service," he said.
DIA is now used by 123 airlines and links Dubai with 210 destinations. Terminal 1 expects to handle 40 million passengers this year compared with about 34 million in 2007.
Using Dubai's hub position, Emirates is also rapidly expanding its network and buying new planes. The new budget airline, FlyDubai, will start operating next year and has plans to fly to 70 destinations eventually.
"Dubai is in a unique geo-centric position, where we have by default become the world's most significant hub. The logical pairings of cities in the world that can be served via Dubai has changed.
"We are merely consolidating that position seeing the future possibilities," Griffiths said of the city's transformation into a major transport hub.
Other airports and airlines within the region "would love to take some of the market share of what Emirates and Dubai Airports are achieving," he said.
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