Gov’t readies budget terminal in Clark

The government would proceed with plans to build a budget terminal at the Clark International Airport in Pampanga by the first quarter of 2014 with completion targetted in 2015, transportation assistant secretary Jaime Feliciano said Monday.

The DOTC, through Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC), would follow this up with the expansion of its “legacy terminal,” which is for full-service flights, possibly under a public private partnership (PPP) scheme, he added.

The new budget terminal, which would cover 45,000 square meters, could expand Clark’s capacity by as much as four and a half million passengers, according to Feliciano.

The airport has a current capacity of two million passengers a year. The facility is undergoing expansion—scheduled for completion in the third quarter—that will increase this to four million to five million passengers annually.

“The plan is that while the construction of the budget terminal is ongoing, the business case on the PPP side [for the legacy terminal] is already starting. So we are doing things simultaneously and not sequentially,” Feliciano said at the sidelines of the Philippine Stock Exchange-Asiamoney forum on tourism, gaming and leisure.

One of the structures being studied by the DOTC was to bid out the legacy terminal project as well as the operations and maintenance (O&M) contracts for both the legacy and budget terminal, he said.