In a first for India, Delhi Airport gets a fourth runway…an elevated taxiway

As Air India flight 821 (Delhi-Srinagar) touched down on the freshly built runway on the muggy Friday summer morning at India’s busiest and the world’s seventh-busiest airport, the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), it was liberally sprayed with water streams from two fire tenders parked on the runway.

The event made IGIA the first in the country to launch a fourth runway as well as an elevated taxiway.

Managed and operated by the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL), a consortium led by GMR Airports Infrastructure, measures have long been afoot at IGIA to enhance both airside and terminal capacity. The unveiling of the fourth runway and the eastern cross taxiway (ECT) is expected to substantially improve the turnaround time for both the airlines operating to and from the airport as well as passengers transiting through it.

The new runway—technically called 11L-29R—has a length of 4,400 metres and a width of 45 metres and is designed to handle widebody aircraft.

The ECT is 2.1 kilometres long and 44 metres wide, with a gap of 47 metres between the two lanes, and has been built to allow safe and simultaneous passage of two large jetliners. The taxiways will connect northern and southern airfields and reduce taxi distance for aircraft by 7 kilometres to the three terminals at IGIA even as a fourth one is coming up.

“From about 70 million passengers per year as the biggest airport in India, the Delhi Airport will soon become one of the largest airports in the world at 109 million passengers per year,” Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia declared at the inauguration.

Though the runway was completed in 2021, it took a little over two years to operationalise it. And the secret behind the delay was revealed by none other than shy GMR Group Chairperson Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao. “The delay in procurement of the instrument landing system (ILS) due to the conflict in Ukraine led to [this],” disclosed Rao.

Both the new runway and the taxiway are capable of handling large aircraft and wide-body jets such as Airbus 380, Boeing 777 and Boeing 747-8.

Together with the new integrated Terminal-1, the fourth runway and the ECT will enable Delhi Airport to be future-ready. Simply put, the four runways and the ECT will significantly increase IGIA’s capacity from 1,500 aircraft movements per day to 1,700.

It is also estimated that by optimising taxiing routes and aircraft operations, the ECT would especially help in a reduction of an estimated 55,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

Following the announcement, GMR stock price closed at Rs 44.80 per share, up Rs 1.36 from the previous close.