See inside the $270 million airport no-one uses
Have you ever visited Sri Lanka? Chances are you didn’t land at the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport. Built in 2013 for around $270 million, the ultra-modern airport was designed to manage a million passengers each year. In reality? It sees only around 50 to 75 departing travellers per day.
Located in Mattala, a tiny rural area of Sri Lanka, it was touted as the nation’s next big tourism, transportation and commercial hub. But its location turned out to be its biggest downfall, isolated from the country’s tourist attractions and urban centres.
“FlyDubai is our scheduled flight operator from this airport,” airport manager Upul Kalansuriya told the BBC. “It flies from Colombo to Mattala to Dubai. At the moment that’s the only airline.”
The airport was the brainchild of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who chose the location simply because it was in his hometown – despite the tiny population of 23,000 people, 32 per cent of whom live below the poverty line. Political commentators and the opposition slammed the project as a very expensive plan to win over the local voters.
China was instrumental in raising funds for the project – $190 million, in fact – believing Sri Lanka to be an important stepping stone on the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”. A second airport was also appealing due to the country’s main international airport at Colombo beginning to crumble under the overwhelming traffic.
Despite initially operating around seven flights a day (including Mattala to and from Bangkok, Beijing, Chennai, Jeddah and Shanghai), route after route was cut, losing the airport an average of $23 million a year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rajapaksa was replaced at the 2015 presidential election by one of his biggest rivals and critics, Maithripala Sirisena. “Wasted money became a core issue of the election campaign,” Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of Colombo’s Centre for Policy Alternatives, told Al Jazeera. “These were obviously vanity projects that he built with the expectation of being in power forever.”
The airport itself has become something of a tourist attraction, with visitors to the local area paying a fee to simply look inside. If you’d also like to see it, simply scroll through the gallery above.