My Tryst With Lucknow Airport Officials

On June 26th, 2012 I wrote the following mail to Lucknow Airport Public Relations Officer:

To: pgofficerchq@aai.aero

Subject: No space for passengers to wait

Hello Officer,

I am pleased to see the new airport, but very disappointed by the lack of seating for waiting passengers.

With two gates, there is total of 80 seats for passengers to wait. Two commercial flights can host anywhere between 200 and 300 passengers.

This is grossly dissatisfactory as this is not a problem of space, one can see plenty of unoccupied and wasted space, this is a failure of planning.

-- Amit Upadhyay

I got prompt reply, first reply at 10PM in the night! To my dismay the report was closed:

From: PGO Officer Lucknow pgo_lko@aai.aero

Subject: Re: FW: No space for passengers to wait G No 143 dt 27/06/2012

Sir,

The reply received from Jt. G.M.(Ops.) for your information on the above mentioned subject.

Quote

Maximum number of seats (90 seats) have been made available on the ground floor of domestic SHA. This is the maximum which can be placed there as some space have to be kept for movement of PAX.

Unquote

-- Anil Vajpayee, Public Grievances Officer

To this I replied:

Hello Officers,

I am very happy to see such prompt replies.

The assertion that 1. In current configuration maximum 90 seats can be placed and 2. 90 seats are indeed there, are both correct.

But this was not my complaint, my complaint is: 1. There are two gates, with two air crafts, each with 180 passenger capacity, the requirement is for 360 seats. Providing 90 seats where 360 is required is grossly bad planning. 2. There is possibility of making very minor modifications to allow for more seating capacity.

For example:

Proposal 1: the security check can be shifted backwards allowing another 90 or 120 more seats. Currently nearly half of the hall is used for security check queue and other half for seating. security check queue has sufficient place to stand comfortable before entering the hall.

Proposal 2: there is another section right next to domestic gates 1 and 2, separated by a glass wall. That section too has 90 seat capacity. It was for international flights presumably. There are not enough international flights compared to domestic ones. The wall can be shifted, allowing for 90 more seats on domestic side and reducing the number of seats in international to 45.

Proposal 3: remove international boarding altogether from ground floor and shift them to first floor. This ll give significantly more room, and even though 4 gates are there only 2-3 flights are scheduled at the same time. Even in the case that all 4 flights are schedule on 4 gates, breaking down the partition will give more space for seats. Further only one section of security would be required instead of two so seats can be placed in that space too.

Proposal 4: only use one gate at ground level. There are more gates on first floor. There was three flights in 1 hr from ground floor and none from first floor. This kind of situation can be avoided by equidistribution of flights on either level.

-- Amit Upadhyay

I got no reply from them afterwards and I considered matter closed. Till I visited lucknow airport on my next trip, this is what I saw:

As you can see they implemented my "Proposal 2". On left is Gate 1 and 2, domestic flights, and right is for international flights. When I wrote the mail it was a glass wall, now it has been opened.

Ye! :-)