OFTEN CALLED 'AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER in the Indian Ocean', the Maldives’ Malé Velana International (MLE) is teeming with traffic. Last year, some 4.3 million travelers passed through its 1980s-vintage terminal, which was originally designed for 1.5 million. 

However, at some point between the end of this year and the first months of 2025, the pressure on that old terminal will ease, as a giant new one will finally open to the public. The Maldivian government is pushing for it to open before the end of 2024, but others consider a springtime inauguration to be more realistic.

The soon-to-open 19-acre (7.7 hectare) building is the cherry on the cake of a huge makeover. “A conversation about how to cope with an ever-growing demand started as far back as 2004,” Ibrahim Shareef Mohamed, CEO and Managing Director at the government-owned and controlled Maldivian Airports Company (MACL), told Airways in his Malé office. 

It took more than 20 years for that ‘conversation’ to become a reality. 

Tourism in the Maldives started in the mid-1970s. It grew steadily during the last two decades of the last century and literally boomed at the beginning of the new millennium as travelers from Russia, China, India, and the Gulf countries flocked to the paradise archipelago.

Huhlule Island was uninhabited in October 1960, when the first and only airport in the country was completed with a 3,000ft (914m) runway paved with steel sheets. The first commercial flight was operated by Air Ceylon almost two years later, on April 10, 1962.

A major improvement to the facilities came in 1964, when asphalt replaced the steel sheets. A new 9,317ft (2,840m) runway was inaugurated in April 1966 by then-Maldivian president Ibrahim Nasir, to whom the airport was dedicated from 2011 to 2017 (the present name, ‘Velana’, refers to his family name).

But it was only at the end of the 1970s, with the start of mass tourism, that MLE started to assume its current aspect: the runway was once again extended to its present 11,150ft (3,400m) length and a proper terminal was built to its west. That building has been enlarged and refurbished many times during the last four decades, resulting in an inefficient and disorienting layout across its limited floor surface of just 274,300sq ft (25,500m²).

Just as passenger comfort had been poor for so many years landside, so had the aircraft space airside: the runway did not have...