Swiss CEO of new Bangalore airport in race against time

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BANGALORE, July 16 (AFP): Swiss CEO Albert Brunner, whose nation takes pride in its clocks and watches, is racing against time to get a showpiece airport up and running in the hi-tech Indian city of Bangalore.
April 2, 2008, is Brunner's deadline for Bangalore International Airport to receive and send off the first of the eight million passengers it expects to handle in its first year.
That is a date the chief executive of Bangalore International Airport Ltd., (BIAL) is determined to keep.
If he succeeds, it will be a remarkable victory for a project conceived in 1991 but construction of which began only 14 years later after it was awarded in July 2005 to a consortium including Unique Zurich Airport, Siemens of Germany and Larsen & Toubro of India.
The airport, expected to cost 500 million dollars, has been designed for 11 million passengers a year, up from the five million first envisaged, as traffic growth accelerated with an expanding economy.
"It has been a race against time from day one," Brunner, 57, who previously worked on the two-billion-dollar Zurich airport expansion, said in an interview on the project site. "We have really had to struggle because we made it much bigger."
India's airport infrastructure is in terrible shape, as any passenger can testify in a country where landing at the Delhi or Bangalore airports may be preceded by two hours circling before a pilot finds parking space.