Balitimes admin October 29, 2024

Bali set to have second airport under Indonesia’s new president Prabowo

JAKARTA – Indonesia’s resort island of Bali is set to have a second international airport, with the long-delayed project now being revived under the new administration of President Prabowo Subianto.

A politician from ruling party Gerindra told The Straits Times on Oct 21 that the newly inaugurated president is fully on board with the project. “Pak Prabowo wants this project supported,” he said, declining to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The second airport will be located in the north of Bali, in the Kubutambahan district in Buleleng regency – some two hours by road from Bali’s capital city of Denpasar – and is intended to ease congestion at the existing Gusti Ngurah Rai airport and overcrowding around tourist hot spots like Kuta, Seminyak and Canggu in the south.

About 15.5 million visitors flocked to Bali in 2023, close to the level in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic years, when tourism around the world practically ground to a halt.

Former tourism minister Sandiaga Uno said on Oct 18 that Bali needs a second airport in the north to facilitate traffic to the less-visited tourist spots there. He said the airport project, which was first mooted in 2016, did not take off during Mr Joko Widodo’s term as president because it did not get enough political support.

“With the power change, I foresee the north Bali airport will finally be built,” he said in a reply to ST’s query at a group breakfast in Jakarta.

Plans for the second airport had been made in 2020 under a non-binding agreement in which China Construction First Group was to finance and build the airport at an estimated cost of 50 trillion rupiah (S$4.2 billion) with a local partner, Jakarta-based Bibu Panji Sakti.

But the project did not go ahead due to opposition from Ms Megawati Soekarnoputri, chairwoman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which was the ruling party then.

With PDI-P now in the opposition and Gerindra in the driver’s seat, the second airport is back on track. The project had previously been estimated to take two to three years to complete.

The new airport, under the 2020 plan, is expected to serve up to 20 million passengers, or 126,490 flights, a year and be able to accommodate wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 777-300 and Airbus A380.

It is not known if the same parties will be involved in the second airport project and when it will be completed. Newly appointed Tourism Minister Widiyanti Putri Wardhana and the Transport Ministry’s head of communication and public information, Mr Budi Rahardjo, did not respond to queries from ST.

News of the revived second airport project comes after a widely reported incident in December 2023 when traffic congestion forced travellers to abandon their cars and walk to Ngurah Rai airport.

Ngurah Rai’s capacity is 24 million passengers, said the airport’s general manager, Mr Handy Heryudhitiawan. He told reporters in July 2024 that the single-runway airport is expanding its boarding and departure halls, in anticipation that passenger traffic would reach maximum capacity soon.

In January 2023, Ms Megawati had said she opposed the new airport in north Bali because it would benefit only investors but not the Balinese people. She also said that Ngurah Rai could still be expanded and that the nearest other airport in Banyuwangi, East Java, could also serve incoming tourists to Bali.

But observers say the island’s southern part is already too congested and overdeveloped.

“The passenger traffic of the airport in the south has stretched airport resources to their maximum… This is why local residents complained and resisted whenever any new project started there, because it’s already packed and crowded,” said Mr Dirgayuza Setiawan, who was formerly a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and helped draw up Mr Prabowo’s economic growth plan. He is also a member of Gerindra.

A second airport in the north would help spread development more evenly across the tourism-dependent island.

“The tourism potential in the north is huge. There is Lovina Beach, waterfalls, and quite a number of resorts have been built,” said Mr Dirgayuza.

Northern Bali features stunning waterfalls, forests and rice terraces, while Lovina Beach is known for its black sand beaches, coral reefs and bottle-nosed dolphins.