REUTERS
Ethiopia will complete expansion of the capital’s airport in 2018 to triple the number of passengers it handles from 7 million a year now and will soon pick a site for a new hub to deal with 10 times the number in the future, a senior official said.
Bole International Airport, on the edge of Addis Ababa, is home to Ethiopian Airlines, the state-owned national carrier that is Africa’s largest by revenue and profit.
Less than a decade ago, the airport handled 1 million passengers a year, but that rose to 7 million in 2014. Officials expect it to climb by 18 percent a year in the next few years.
“We did not expect this growth to happen in eight years,” Hailu Gebremariam, Ethiopian Airports Enterprise project manager for Bole, told Reuters. “That is why we are undertaking an expansion of the airport that will serve us for the next 15 years, with a capacity of about 20 million passengers a year.”
Expansion work began in September 2014 at the airport, where passengers can face long lines at peak travel and transit times.
Ethiopia, with one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, is looking at sites for a new international airport to serve up to 70 million a year, Hailu said. By comparison, Dubai International Airport, the world’s biggest for passenger traffic, handled 70.5 million passengers in 2014.
The cost of such an airport could be $2.5 billion to $3 billion. Ethiopian Airlines has been rapidly expanding its fleet. It now has 77 aircraft, with 44 more on order.