Listen in as iGA Istanbul Airport CEO Selahattin Bilgen shares what it was like to move one of Europe’s busiest airports to a new site in just 33 hr., along with his plans to transition to triple parallel runway operations.
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Rush Transcript
Victoria Moores:
Thank you for joining us for Window Seat, our Aviation Week Air Transport podcast. I'm Air Transport World European Bureau Chief Victoria Moores. Welcome on board.
In today's episode, I'm joined by Selahattin Bilgen, who is the chief executive of Istanbul Grand Airport, or IGA as it's known for short. Now, IGA is a very interesting airport to watch because it has such ambitious growth plans. At the moment, it's handling about 85 million passengers a year, but it has ambitions to extend its capacity to 200 million passengers a year. And it's already risen from number five in Europe for direct air connectivity up to number one position. So, we're seeing a lot of activity, a lot of construction work, and a lot of expansion at the airport.
Now, I caught up with Selahattin at the very calming Raffles Hotel in London, just ahead of this week's ACI Europe meeting in Istanbul. So, let's go over to Selahattin and hear what he's got to say.
Selahattin, thank you for joining us today.
Selahattin Bilgen:
Thank you for hosting me.
Victoria Moores:
You became acting chief executive of IGA Airport in September 2023, but that was after you'd completed a momentous project of relocating a very, very busy live airport across from the former facilities at Atatürk over to IGA. How was that as an experience to be part of that process of moving a live airport across?
Selahattin Bilgen:
To be honest, it was the experience of our lives, not just for me, but for the whole team. And I had the chance to be in the project since from the beginning. I used to be working for investment banking and corporate banking side. After the tender of Istanbul Airport, I was transferred to one of the shareholders of the project and I had the chance to work for the financing of this project. And towards the end of the construction, I was appointed as the chief financial officer at IGA. And as you just said, after six years of being the CFO, I was mandated for the acting CEO role. And last April, the position has become permanent.
The experience for Istanbul Airport has been a unique one. We had to complete a huge scale of airport construction project in just 42 months’ time. But at the end of that construction period, we also had more challenging thing to do, which was to transfer a large-scale, Istanbul's Atatürk Airport's operation to our new airport just within 33 hours. So, this was again, a lifetime experience for all of us.
Victoria Moores:
Absolutely. And I mean if we put the numbers in context, in 2023, IGA handled 76 million passengers. That's the second-busiest in Europe, the second-busiest in the Middle East. It is a huge operation to shift over. Did you hit any issues, anything unexpected during the transfer when you did start the airport's operations?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Well, of course, in such a big operation, there can be always some issues to take care and some unexpected things, but from the general picture, we had a very smooth operational transfer. Actually, we only had 33 hours for the transfer, but we had the planning and all preparation for that for more than two years. For example, we had several operations where we had staff or take two people from outside as fake passengers to test our systems, to test our baggage handling check-in systems. So, we also provided a huge number of trainings, not only to IGA staff, but also the staff of the other stakeholders as well, because we were moving from Atatürk Airport to Istanbul Airport, which had a much larger scale, a newly built airport.
And since we had to do this simultaneously, we even had to use VR technology before finishing the construction work. We made trainings and provided people for the know-how of where to go, what to do in the new airport in a virtual environment. So, with this high level of planning and huge efforts during the preparation side, we were able to transfer that huge operations without a major flow or problem.
Victoria Moores:
It is a massive undertaking. And of course, that was back in 2019 when all of the scheduled commercial operations were transferred over. Obviously, we've been through COVID since then, but you've got a real vision going forward over the next 20 years for the development of the airport. I wonder if you could talk through just very briefly the stages of the growth that you expect to go through over the next 20 years?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Well, Istanbul has a real unique strategic location for the aviation movements. In the past, the larger part of the air traffic movements were coming from Northern America and Western Europe. But by the time it has become possible for other parts of the world to use air traffic more, so Istanbul has become the center of all air traffic movements globally. So, building a large-scale airport with a large capacity has become a necessity.
So, the advantage of Istanbul Airport has been to plan this large-scale airport from scratch. We have a very well-defined master plan. We have a very well-defined business plan. So, we know how much we have to invest and when, to reach capacities. So, we have a mechanism where we have several phases of investments which are triggered by certain thresholds. So, when we reach certain passenger number levels, we have to increase the capacity of the terminal side. When we reach certain air traffic movement numbers, we have to invest in new runway developments.
So, in total, we have a four-phase development plan, and the largest part was the first phase where we built 1.4 million square meters of terminal building, which is the largest terminal building in the world. And we built three independent and two ancillary runways. And we are currently continuing our investments under phase two, where we will increase the terminal capacity from 90 million to 120 million passengers, and also adding one more main runway and one more ancillary runway.
So, the runway investments has already started. The terminal capacity expansion will most probably kick in in the new coming year. So, that's where we stand with respect to the investments. But in the future, we will continue with phase three and phase four, and ultimately, the handling capacity of the airport will go up to 200 million passengers per year.
Victoria Moores:
So, that's from 76 million, I think it was, last year. That's massive growth. And you mentioned there about the runways, how you're already looking into bringing on board more runways, more ancillary runways. You've got the three main runways at the moment. I understand there's a project underway to potentially operate those three runways in parallel. Could you give us a bit of an update on that?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Yeah, exactly. It has been one of the major projects in our agenda to operate the three runways independently for take-off and landing. So, currently, although we have the infrastructure to have these three independent three runways, two of them are operated independently, and the third one is operated dependently. And, in Europe, there is no example for this triple parallel independent runway operations.
So, we are currently working - together with Turkish Civil Aviation Authority and State Airports Authority, Turkish Airlines, and EUROCONTROL - for the design and operation of this triple parallel independent operations. This will help us to increase the capacity usage of the runways, but at the same time, will provide huge efficiencies in the turnaround times, taxi times, and capacity usage in the other parts of the airport as well.
Victoria Moores:
What sort of benefit are we talking about there in terms of time saved?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Well, our studies show that we will be able to have more than 50,000 minutes of ground operations decreased as a result of more efficient operations. So, this is a huge efficiency. It would help decrease turnaround times of the aircrafts, decrease the taxi times, decrease fuel consumption. So, it will benefit to the environment, to the passenger experience, to the airlines, to the airport capacity utilizations. In many aspects, it would be a real landmark project.
Victoria Moores:
So, you've got that real capacity to grow and extend and to really develop the hub at Istanbul. I'm wondering, where do you see yourselves in terms of world rankings within the next five years?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Well, there are several rankings we are looking after, so we have already achieved some part of them. For example, currently, Istanbul Airport is the most connected airport in the world. We have more than 315 destinations in Istanbul, and we are being Europe's number one for four consecutive years with respect to air traffic movement numbers. And also, we are currently hosting 106 airlines, with new additions towards the end of this year, we would be, again, globally number one within that respect as well.
But, with respect to passenger numbers and international passenger numbers, we are also aiming for the top spot there. We should be focusing on some markets where we are under-penetrated like Northern America, Asia-Pacific and Far East. So, we are currently working in several business case projects with several airlines and also government authorities, in order to increase the frequencies and destinations.
Victoria Moores:
And so, which destinations will be top of your wish list that Istanbul isn't currently connected to, but you would really like to see getting on your route map?
Selahattin Bilgen:
Well, both Northern America and Far East are very huge markets, and at the same time, really under-penetrated by Istanbul. Just talking about, for example, China, the outbound tourism from China was about 150 million tourists before COVID. But out of that potential, Istanbul was able to host only 450,000, which makes lower than 0.5%.
And taking into account the largest share of China tourists are towards Europe, and also, considering air travel from China to Europe is around one-and-a-half to two hours shorter than its current transfer points, which are in the Middle East. Istanbul is strategically very well-located to have a larger share of that traffic. Up until now, there has been reciprocity issues and capacity constraints with respect to frequencies and airlines, but now we are in very close discussions on both sides with Turkish authorities, Chinese authorities, and carriers as well. So, it's very likely that the traffic from China and Far East will increase.
We are also having a good cooperation with Asia-Pacific hubs like Thailand. We had Thai Airways start their flights to Istanbul last year. So, connecting these regional hubs with Istanbul would also be beneficial for both sides. The passengers coming to Istanbul will have the option to be connected to the rest of the world with the highest number of connections. So, the top priority for us is to focus on Asia-Pacific and Far East currently.
Victoria Moores:
And that's subject to those route-right negotiations, which are already underway.
Selahattin Bilgen:
Yeah.
Victoria Moores:
Selahattin, I think that that's just about all that we've got time for today, but it sounds as though there's a lot on your to-do list at the moment, as you continue to develop the airport. So, thank you very much for sharing your insights today.
Selahattin Bilgen:
Thank you.
Victoria Moores:
And thank you also to our producer, Cory Hitt, and to you, our listeners. Make sure you don't miss us each week by subscribing to the Window Seat Podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Until next week, this is Victoria Moores disembarking from Window Seat.
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