St Vincent’s air hub to be ready next year

St Vincent’s air hub to be ready next year
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Chris Hoyos 
 
KINGSTOWN, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Monday, July 2, 2012 – Argyle International Airport is on target to open in late 2013.

This has been confirmed by the developer responsible for constructing the new St Vincent and the Grenadines international air gateway. According to the International Airport Development Company (IADC), work has been
completed on close to three-quarters of the earthworks for required for the airport’s runway, apron and taxiways. Earthworks on the airport commenced in August 2008 and since then the work team, comprising Vincentians and Cubans, have been have been hard at work, clearing and grubbing the area, demolishing the abandoned structures on the site, and removing the top soil.

The IADC affirmed that “work on the terminal building continues apace”, ensuring that it is on schedule to be completed by the contracted date of December 2013, in time for the tourism high season in the Caribbean.

The Argyle International Airport is being built on about 290 acres of land, with a paved runway 2,743 metres (9,000 feet) long, and 45 metres (150 feet) wide. Its runway length will allow for direct flights to St Vincent and the Grenadines from USA, Canada, Europe and Central and South America. The airport is designed to accommodate jets as large as the Boeing 747-400s.

The US$216 million airport is expected to boast a single 1.5 million capacity per annum terminal built over three-storeys on 145,000sq ft with dedicated areas for ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ passengers. The terminal building
will have about 8,700 square metres of floor space, to handle about 1.4 million passengers per year.

As of May 2012, the contractor, Overseas Engineering Construction Company (OECC), had completed 23 percent of the work on the building.

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