Main Chennai Airport runway to be extended
The main runway at the Meenambakkam airport is set to be extended to 4.058 km paving the way for wide-bodied aircraft like the Airbus A-380 series, which has three decks of floors, to use the international airport, where passenger traffic had been increasing by the day, forcing the authorities to look for a site to construct a second airport for Chennai.
Since the Greenfield Airport, proposed to be set up at Parandur with ultra-modern facilities, might take a while to become operational with even land acquisition for the project not yet started and the plan was never to abandon the present airport in Meenambakam, the runway extension work is likely to start soon in right earnest making use of 10.20 acres of land, handed over to the Airports Authority of India recently by the State government.
Even otherwise, work on the construction of modern terminals for the international and domestic airports in Meenambakkam, spread out on 1,350 acres of land, is going on at a cost Rs 2,400 crore, and the new plan to extend the old runway by another 400 metres will only enable the landing and taking off of bigger aircraft like Airbus A-380 that are part of the fleet of carriers like Emirates and Singapore Airlines that operate services to Chennai.
Chennai will soon join the select club of Indian airports with the facility for operating modern aircraft like Airbus A-380, which is now available only in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Those aircraft with a seating capacity upto 746 seats in three floors have never landed in Chennai, which had seen many other aviation marvels like the Concorde and also the Airbus A 400M Atlas.
Justice T Raja to be acting CJ of Madras High Court
Justice T Raja will be performing the duties of Chief Justice of the Madras High Court from Sept. 22 as the current Acting CJ M. Duraiswamy retires on Sept. 21. Justice Raja had his education in Madurai District and studied Law at the Madurai Law College. He was elevated as Judge of the Madras HC in 2009.
Battle for AIADMK goes to EC
As former CM Edappadi Palaniswami is in New Delhi to meet the top officials of the Election Commission of India to press his case for recognition of his control of a majority of the AIADMK party, his former colleague and former CM O. Panneerselvam is in Varanasi praying at the Kashi Vishwanath temple. While EPS is going ahead with running the party, OPS believes he can rope in Sasikala and her nephew TTV Dhinakaran and somehow merge everyone into the AIADMK, provided his claim to the party is accepted by the courts but he faces hurdles there as the party majority is what is accepted as the current legal position.
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