Sri Lanka airport crunch looming

The Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) handled 5.26 million people in 2010 but will soon not have enough check-in counters and boarding gates to handle increasing traffic. "Its design capacity is six million people which we will reach by the end of 2011," declared GT Jeyaseelan, chief marketing officer of Sri Lankan Airlines, the island's national carrier, which has the monopoly on ground handling at the airport. "Where do we go from here?" The BIA has only 50 check-in counters, eight bridge gates and four remote gates.