Clark International Airport Corp. plans to build a new airport control tower and upgrade the airfield’s ground lighting system at Clark International Airport (CRK) within the year.
The control tower will cost P375 million and upgrade of lighting system, P500 million.
“The new airport tower will be the tallest in the country, 18-storeys in height or around 54 meters, much higher than the existing one built by the Americans when Clark was still a US military base,” CIAC president Aaron Aquino said in a statement.
The control tower at Mactan-Cebu International Airport is 30 meters high while the tower at Ninoy Aquino International Airport is about 40 meters.
Aquino said the government-run corporation has initiated the bidding process for the design and build project, which is expected to start construction in the next few months.
“The projects are expected to improve Clark’s air traffic control system even as a new terminal building, with an annual capacity of eight million passengers, is slated to become fully functional by January 2021,” Aquino said.
READ: Clark airport new passenger terminal building open by Jan 2021
The projects are two major components of CIAC’s airport infrastructure expansion program whose funding was approved via the General Appropriations Act of 2020 under the account of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority, CIAC’s parent company.
While CRK is operated and maintained by private concessionaire LIPAD Corp., CIAC has refocused its operations to further develop the 2,367-hectare Clark Civil Aviation Complex for commercial use in the next two to three years. Currently, the consortium of Megawide Construction Corp. and India’s GMR Infrastructure Ltd., which won the contract to engineer, procure, and construct the CRK expansion project, is completing the airport’s second passenger terminal building.
