Noida: How 3,000 workers are living on site and giving shape to Delhi-NCR’s second international airport

GREATER NOIDA: Jewar's metamorphosis from nondescript village to India's newest airport town is happening fast, and the large complex that is driving this transformation embodies this change.
The contours of what will become NCR's second international airport by October next year have started taking shape as 3,000 workers of Tata Projects toil away night and day at the site, with Christoph Schnellman, the airport's CEO, at the helm.

Outside the compound, the rush to cash in on the real estate boom that has been seen in the region ever since the project was announced is immediately apparent. Property dealer signboards with aircraft pictures abound on the Sikandrabad-Jewar road (off the Yamuna Expressway) that leads to the site.
Within the airport site's boundaries, hardly a minute passes without activity. Kitchens have been set up where workers from different states and regions cook their staple diets. There's no one size - or 'thali' in this case - fits all for the hardworking bunch in a dust bowl where May mornings feel several degrees hotter than the early 40 degrees reading that the weather app shows.
Soon, it's going to be a year since work began. "Work started last June, and so far, about 60 lakh safe man hours have been put in without any major injury. Safety is the prime focus as we build what will be the most modern and well-connected Indian airport within the stipulated time frame," Schnellman, a Flughafen Zurich veteran who in 2007-08 played a key role when it was building the new Bengaluru Airport, told TOI at the site.
A 38-metre-high air traffic control (ATC) tower, the terminal building, a fuel farm, the taxiway, the runway and internal approach roads are all being simultaneously built. The terminal building's starting point will have an underground approach that will connect with the multi-modal transport hub, which in turn will link the airport up with any rail network - like RapidX or metro - that might be built in future.
The ATC tower will be handed over to the Airports Authority of India, which handles this function, between January and March 2024 so they can start putting the required systems in place.
Once operational, NCR will have Delhi's IGIA functioning like New York's JFK or London's Heathrow and the Noida International Airport (NIA) as La Guardia or Gatwick. While NIA will essentially cater to domestic traffic, its runway can handle big wide-body aircraft too that are used for medium to ultra-long-haul international flights. The distance between IGIA and NIA is about 90 km and till other proposed connectivity modes ARE ready, commute between the two will be mainly by road and take anywhere from 90-120 minutes.
The NIA aims to launch passenger flight operations by December 2024.
Schnellman marvels at the Indian growth story, with aviation growing here at the fastest pace in the world. "Ever since we started planning this project (from the bidding phase) in 2019, we have been upwardly revising the traffic projections. This airport will be built in four phases, with our plans for NIA estimating the ultimate capacity at 7 crore passengers annually that will be handled by two terminals and as many runways. We feel the next three rounds of expansion will be triggered much earlier than we had originally expected," he said.
Since 2019, NIA has revised its traffic projections for 2025-2030 upward by over 30% and it expects phase II expansion to get under way before 2030, going by present estimates.