| Work Detail |
Islamabad - The newly-built Islamabad International Airport is set to kick-start operations for regular domestic and international flights from April 20.
According to Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) will operate a first mock flight from the New Islamabad International Airport today. The mock flight will carry PIA staff members and their families.
Operations of Benazir Bhutto International Airport will be shifted to the new airport by 19 April.
Spreading 19 square kilometres, the “Y” shaped new airport will be the biggest international airport of the country in terms of landing and passenger handling facilities. It has two runways each 3.5 km long.
The new airport has 15 passenger boarding bridges including facilities to accommodate two double-decks A380, the world’s largest airplane, 15 remote bays and seven remote bays for small aircraft such as ATRs with same of lounges to avoid mixing of passengers.
The new airport was initially going to be commissioned by 14 August last year but slew of irregularities and slow construction led to repeated delays.
On August 27, the auditor general’s report for 2016-17 detected massive irregularities in the construction of the airport, including irregularly awarding work to ineligible contractors in violation of rules and causing losses of billions of rupees to the national exchequer.
The Auditor General of Pakistan had also identified violation of the Planning Commission’s project management guidelines, including rules of Public Procurement Regulations Authority (PPRA) in several projects.
According to the report which was recently tabled in parliament, tendering for ‘aircraft stand equipment’ was unjustifiably delayed, resulting in payment of higher rates because of limited competition and fluctuations in foreign currency rate.
Work on this project was awarded at Rs5.99 billion or 25.3 per cent higher than the engineer’s provisional estimate of Rs4.7 billion.
“Audit maintains that unjustified delay in tendering process caused award of work at higher rates without revision of the initial Project Cycle (PC) I which was due to weak internal controls.”
The audit also observed that details of original and final estimates of engineer were also not produced in support of the Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA) reply.
For the project titled ‘special baggage handling system for passenger terminal building’, the audit noted that tenders were advertised in May 2013 but contractors were not even registered with the Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) in individual and joint venture capacity. Similarly, additional work of Rs587 million was awarded during negotiation process against PPRA rules. |
