For the first time since the public outcry against the chaos at the international terminal, Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), the company renovating IGI Airport, has admitted its mistake: to tackle renovation work at a breakneck speed that put passengers in a fix.

“We learnt a lot with our experience,” DIAL’s chief operating officer Andrew Harrison said on Friday. “Looking back, we would do things differently. Our deadlines were aggressive, which caused a lot of inconvenience to passengers — and our staff, too.”

Harrison was addressing the media at the IGI international terminal during the first peek at the renovated terminal — work there got over on June 31. For the past more than six months, it took passengers between three and four hours to reach the aircraft after arrival at the airport (globally, business-class passengers are checked in within 5 minutes; see box).

The traffic situation was no better outside the terminal.

DIAL was initially supposed to wrap up renovation work by March 30 this year, but it sought more time from the Civil Aviation ministry to reduce the chaos. DIAL’s pitch, Harrison said, was to take up renovation work of small portions of operational area at a time to reduce inconvenience.

Harrison said: “The situation was a little bad for a few months between November (2007) and January. Ideally we should have been renovating only 20 percent of the operational space, but with our deadlines we were working on 35 per cent of the operational space.” This, he said, was the “reason for all the trouble”.

Besides carrying out major changes in the terminal’s look — such as changing the flooring, seating, design of counters, the plant arrangement and other minor changes — DIAL has increased the number of immigration and check-in counters. It has also introduced in-line baggage screening system. Check-in counters have increased from 78 to 100, X-ray units from 8 to 16, and emigration counters from 28 to 52.

Lately, the terminal has also hit the headlines for leaking roof. But Harrison blamed the building’s design and poor condition in which it was handed over to DIAL: “I can’t promise you that this building would ever be leak-proof. You would probably see us mopping a leak, but no machine would ever stop working because of leakage.”

According to a detailed study of the processing time taken by each passenger at the airport, it takes a passenger a good 40 minutes to reach the security hold area. An internal sample study by DIAL, though, says the minimum time in an ideal condition taken by passenger to reach check-in counter is 14 minutes in the renovated terminal.

DIAL and Airport Authority of India had commissioned the study.

The 14-minute passage, though, was calculated during lean traffic time. “In the present terminal design we can reasonably reduce it to 30 minutes,” Harrison said.