Sri Lanka's ghost airport. Photo / Wikimedia Commons, Amila Tennakoon
Sri Lanka's ghost airport. Photo / Wikimedia Commons, Amila Tennakoon
Sri Lanka's second international airport is as modern and impressive as any.
It has a long runways built to accommodate the world's largest passenger jets, fully staffed check-in desks, a working cafeteria and souvenir shop, and a stunning entrance hall ready to welcome massive crowds of passengers.
There's just one problem: pretty much no one uses it.
Sri Lanka spent more than $280 million to build the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, which opened in 2013 as the country's second largest airport after Colombo.
The airport, in Mattala, is close to Hambantota, a small, rural area in southern Sri Lanka that a few years ago was designated as the country's next big commercial, tourism and transportation hub.
The empty main entrance hall to Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport. Photo / Wikimedia Commons, Anuradha Dullewe Wijeyeratne
But that dream never came to fruition. And even though the airport was built to service a million domestic and international passengers a year, it's proved to be a flop, with only a handful of passengers a day.
"Per day we can say [there are] about 50 to 75 passengers departing from this airport," airport manager Upul Kalansuriya told the BBC in a recent report.
"FlyDubai is our scheduled flight operator from this airport. It flies from Colombo to Mattala to Dubai. At the moment that's the only airline."
Part of the problem with Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport is its location. It's nowhere near tourist attractions or urban centres - in fact, the ghost airport has become a tourist attraction in itself, with visitors paying admission fees to peek inside the lavish terminal building and the eerily quiet entrance hall.
SO WHAT WAS SRI LANKA THINKING?
The mastermind behind the airport project was Sri Lanka's former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa.
While something needed to be done to redirect congestion in Colombo and invigorate the underdeveloped areas of the country, Rajapaksa's choice of location for a second transportation and tourism hub - his home town of Hambantota - was questioned from the start. The region is almost completely rural, with a small population of 23,000 people - 32 per cent of whom live below the poverty line.
The airport was slammed by critics as a vanity project, while Rajapaksa's political opponents said he used the airport to win over local voters, according to the BBC.
It's not in a particularly exciting part of Sri Lanka. Photo, Wikimedia Commons, adbar
The expense for the new airport was huge, but China was quick to help fund it. According to Forbes, China likely saw Sri Lanka's potential as a major hub on what's been dubbed the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road - a series of ports operated or backed by China, which run from China, through Southeast Asia, across the Indian Ocean, up along the African coast, though the Suez Canal and on to Greece. China invested $247 million towards the total cost of $272 million for the airport, helping get it off the ground. And so on March 2013, Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport - named after the president - was up and running, with about seven flights a day. Flights initially operated from Mattala to and from major international cities including Bangkok, Beijing, Chennai, Jeddah and Shanghai.
But critics continued to question the viability of the airport. According to Forbes, Rajapaksa installed his brother-in-law as the chairman of the national flag carrier, SriLankan Airlines, and pressured the airline to operate a hub at the new airport.
The lack of demand from locals in Hambantota, and the relative lack of interest from everyone else, quickly took its toll. Airlines began to cut services at Mattala airport, while the airline itself lost about $23 million a year.
A GHOST AIRPORT
A change came with the 2015 presdiental election, when Rajapaksa was ousted by political rival and current president Maithripala Sirisena. Sirisena was a big critic of the former regime, accusing Rajapaksa of corruption and criticising his closeness with China.
The check-in desks are staffed, even though barely no one uses them. Photo / Wikimedia Commons, Anuradha Dullewe Wijeyeratne
"The opposition was saying that these projects [in Hambantota] epitomised the waste, the indulgence and the lack of transparency of the Rajapaksa regime," Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of Colombo's Centre for Policy Alternatives, told Al Jazeera.
"Wasted money became a core issue of the election campaign. These were obviously vanity projects that he built with the expectation of being in power forever."
Sirisena vowed to axe many of Sri Lanka's China-backed projects, and one of his first orders of business was to finally allow a struggling SriLankan Airlines to cancel flights to Mattala and scrap its hub at the airport.
"The reality is Mattala Rajapaksa International is not needed and is a distraction in SriLankan's efforts to turn itself around," the airline said in a press release when it announced it would cut operations at Mattala.
The underused control tower. Photo / Wikimedia Commons, Anuradha Dullewe Wijeyeratne
"The flag carrier continues to be highly unprofitable and having to meet the political requirement of developing and operating a second hub will make it even harder to meet its targets for financial improvement."
The future of the airport, and the Hambantota project, remains unclear but for now, only Emirati carrier FlyDubai operates at Mattala, flying passengers between it and Dubai.
But there are signs of hope: in May Sri Lanka's Central Bank said the number of passengers who travelled through the airport in 2016 was 4772, up from 2739 the previous year.
