By Rogers Wanambwa 

KIU, Main Campus - The Uganda Civil Aviation Authority (UCAA), last week, opened part of the first floor of the new Entebbe International Airport Terminal extension to passengers. 

This is in a bid to enable departing passengers to have adequate space at the check-in counters while observing the necessary Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

This was revealed by the Ag Director-General, UCAA, Mr Fred Bamwesigye on a media tour of the completed passenger facilities at Entebbe International Airport, Friday.

“We have had to open because really what we are looking for is adequate space for our passengers for COVID-19 guidelines observance; such as social distancing since the number of passengers keeps on increasing,” said Bamwesigye.

He added that, “With the old facility, we were handling two million passengers a year and this new departure passenger terminal will handle at least more than three million passengers a year since the number of flights per day also increased from the one flight airline per day to at least two per day for the operators that were previously having many daily flights.” 

Last month, October, when commercial passenger operations resumed, Entebbe International Airport recorded 42,633 International passengers with a total of 23,867 arriving, 15,461 departing, and 3,305 transit passengers.

This translated into an average of 1,375 passengers per day.

“There has been an increase in the first 25 days of November 2020, the daily average has increased to 1,676 with about 41,905 international passengers, and with a total of 21,401 arriving, 17,779 departing together along with some 2,705 passengers in transit that were handled from November 1 to November 25, 2020,” said Bamwesigye.

The airport also handled 5,542 metric tons of cargo with an aggregate of 2,241 imports and 3301 exports in October 2020. 

As it is, the upgrade and expansion of Entebbe International Airport is at a 75 percent level of completion.