Dubai Refurbishment to Bring Surge in Passenger Traffic & Plans for APIS

According to Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Makhtoum, president of DCAA and chairman of Dubai airports, the runway refurbishment at Dubai International Airport is expected to bring in a significant surge of passenger traffic.

The expected rise lends weight to the proposed introduction of Advance Passenger Information System (APIS).

“We are confident the completion of the major runway refurbishment program in our history and full schedule operations ahead of the Eid holidays will bring in a significant surge in air traffic,” he said in a message to Via Dubai, the official bi-lingual newsletter of Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (DCAA).

“We are confident about the airport handling over 70 million passengers in 2014, which will bring us further closer to becoming the world’s number one airport for international passengers,” he said.

Via Dubai also announced the GDRFA Dubai is working on plans to launch the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) by the end of this year, or early next year, once approval of the Ministry of the Interior has been granted.

The next project in the pipeline for the airport is a new concourse, which will be connected to an existing terminal by train and is expected to be open in the first quarter of 2015.

The new concourse, the fourth at the airport, is part of a $7.8 billion expansion program, specifically designed to boost the airport’s traffic capability to more than 100 million passengers per year by 2020. The development program is intended to give the airport a capacity for 160 million passengers per year by the time the final phase is completed.