Istanbul New Airport has been officially opened by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on programme in October 2018, on the 95th anniversary of the founding of Turkey. Mott MacDonald, in joint venture with Turkish engineering consultancy Dolsar Engineering, continues to act as lenders’ transactional and technical advisor1 on the project, which is set to be the world’s largest airport once fully operational.
Construction of the airport commenced in May 2015 further to award of the construction and 25 year operational concession to İGA Havalimanı İşletmesi A.Ş. (“İGA”)2. The feature aspect of the new airport is the 1,300,000 sq m main terminal building with over 140 boarding bridges and 600 escalators, elevators and moving walkways, making it the largest in the world. The airport has opened with flights serviced on two runways with a third under construction that will allow the airport to cater for 90 million passengers annually.
Future phases have been planned to ultimately allow Istanbul New Airport to become the world’s largest airport, with additional terminals and a total of six runways increasing passenger handling capacity to 200 million per year.
The Mott MacDonald - Dolsar Engineering joint venture undertook due diligence on the technical and environmental aspects of the scheme allowing financial close to be successfully reached, and construction monitoring, reviewing the design, programme and auditing monthly payments to make sure timescales and budgets are met. The monitoring and reporting of operational performance has now commenced with the start of scheduled traffic.
Adrian Dawes, Mott MacDonald’s project principal, said: “This project has employed cutting-edge design methods to deliver an unprecedented scale of build on a very complex brownfield site within an exceptionally demanding 42 month programme. BIM was essential in distributing just in time information across the site and the contractor used innovative construction prototyping in developing the most efficient design and construction techniques to enable completion on programme.”
The third runway construction works are on schedule to meet the programmed opening date of summer 2020.