Jewar Airport in NCR Won’t Be the Fourth Largest in the World

A Facebook post also claimed that the Jewar airport in NCR will be named after late PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

A Screenshot of the post that is being circulated online.

(Photo courtesy: Facebook/ The India Eye)

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The Jewar airport, which will be constructed in the National Capital Region (NCR), is expected to be operational by 2022. While the clearances and fund approvals for the project are underway, fake claims related to the airport have already started making rounds.

CLAIM

A post put up by a Facebook page called ‘The Indian Eye’ says that the airport will be the world’s fourth largest, and might be named after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

TRUE OR FALSE

The claims of the airport being the fourth largest in the world are false. However, a newspaper report says that the airport could be named after the late Prime Minister, although there is no official confirmation.

WHAT WE FOUND

The post gained significant traction on social media, with 188 shares on Facebook at the time of writing this article.

A Screenshot of the post that is being circulated online.(Photo courtesy: Facebook/ The India Eye)

The Quint reached out to several aviation industry experts who rejected the claims of Jewar being the fourth largest airport.

“No, it’s definitely not going to be the fourth largest airport. At 30 million passengers annually, it can’t be so,” said an official of the CAPA Centre for Aviation, a company that deals in aviation market intelligence, analysis, and data services.

“It might well be the 40th largest airport,” a senior journalist who specialises in the aviation sector said. He added that airports are not built in one go, and are scaled up as air traffic and footfall increases over the years.

Calls made by The Quint to the Ministry of Civil Aviation went unanswered.

As far as naming the airport after Atal Bihari Vajpayee is concerned, no official announcement hasn’t been made yet.

However, Dainik Jagran quoted local MP and Cabinet minister Mahesh Sharma as saying that there are chances of the airport being named after Vajpayee and it may be inaugurated on the former PM’s birthday – 25 December – by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The report also refers to the Jewar airport as the world’s fifth largest.

The proposed international airport in Uttar Pradesh’s Gautam Buddh Nagar, will be the second in the Delhi-NCR region after the Indira Gandhi International Airport.

(With inputs from Dainik Jagran)

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