BEIRUT: A 9 percent increase in passenger flow through Lebanon’s only functional airport was announced Friday, an airport source said. The increase was in relation to the same month last year, with August of this year witnessing a whopping 1,159,815 passengers passing through Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport, the source told The Daily Star.

The increase came as yet another reminder to airport officials to address overcrowding at the departure and arrival terminals. From the beginning of the year until August, a total of 6,002,040 passengers passed through the airport, up from the 5,536,725 passengers recorded within the same period last year.

The airport recorded 400 flights arriving to Beirut last month, a 9 percent year-on-year increase. The number of departing flights increased as well, with 4,012 leaving Beirut last month, marking a 9.4 percent increase.

While transit flights decreased in July compared to last year, the source said that they had now increased by 48.8 percent in August.

The airport’s current capacity is 6 million, a number that has been surpassed every year since 2013. Last year, 8,234,782 travelers passed through the airport, the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation reported.

“We are distributing the times of flights in order to decrease congestion,” an airport official, speaking on condition of anonymity, previously told The Daily Star.

But at the same time, “this congestion indicates that we need to expand the airport – it’s a must,” the official had said, referring to the long-term plan to raise capacity to more than 20 million passengers per year.

Earlier this month, a system failure caused chaos at the airport, delaying all flights departing Beirut, and stranding checked-in passengers overnight.

According to a presentation prepared by the DGCA in March, a $500 million expansion project will be completed by the end of this year, with the tender for the expansion expected to be issued in December 2019 and a contract awarded in June 2020.

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