The Polish government plans to build a new mega-airport designed for 100 million passengers at the cost of PLN 30 billion or EUR 7.1 billion. Construction of the airport will take 10 years, after which the country’s main airport, the Warsaw Chopin Airport, will be closed. This was announced by the Polish government’s representative on construction of the Central Communication Port Mikolaj Wild, the CFTS reports.
"Construction and opening of the Central Communication Port is synonymous with the closure of the airport in Okęcie to traffic… Whether significant aviation operations – for defense, for example – will be performed there is an issue that still awaits our decision," Wild said in an interview with Polish journalists. At the same time, the Warsaw Modlin Airport, which is the base of the Ryanair low-cost airline, will continue to operate.
The location of the future Central Communication Port has not yet been determined. It is known that it will be located between Warsaw and Lodz and within a radius of 40-50 kilometers from the capital city. After the opening of its first phase, the airport will be capable of handling 50 million passengers. Its capacity will subsequently be increased to 100 million passengers.
The exact date of commencement of construction is also not yet known. According to the government, construction work will last 10 years. However, experts consider such a period optimistic.
In general, experts are critical of the plans to build the Central Communication Port. "It is an absurd idea. Where will the airport get more than 50 million passengers per year and the target of 100 million if the air passenger traffic in Poland is estimated to total about 60 million by the year 2030?" said Andrzej Raczynski, a professor at Gdansk University and a former head the Gdansk Airport.
All the airports in Poland handled a record of about 35 million passengers in in 2016, including 12.8 million passengers by the Warsaw Chopin Airport. According to forecasts by Poland’s Civil Aviation Authority, passenger traffic through Polish airports will exceed 59 million by 2030.
The largest airports in the world are Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta (104.1 million passengers), Beijing (94.3 million passengers), and Dubai (83.6 million passengers). The top ten airports in the world include only two European airports: London Heathrow Airport and Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, which handled 75.7 million and 65.9 million passengers, respectively, in 2016.
