Flight Handling
All flights to and from the Lhasa Gonggar Airport are handled by seven Chinese-based airlines: Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Shenzhen, Hainan, Sichuan, and Tibet Airlines. During tourist season (roughly April to October), there can be as many as forty domestic flights every week to and from Gonggar, carrying on average as many as 70,000 passengers every year. There is only one international route at present: a once or twice weekly (depending on the season) flight to and from Kathmandu. Note that it is typically not possible to purchase air tickets directly from these carriers given the requirement of obtaining the necessary governmental travel permit, which is not the same as the visa to gain entry into China proper. It is expected that this figure would reach 110,000 by the year 2010. Pilots landing at Lhasa Gonggar Airport must be specially trained in handling manoeuvres at landing at the high altitude of 3,700 metres (12,100 ft). Incidentally, Nagqu Dagring Airport is expected to become the world's highest altitude airport by 2014 at 4,436 meters above sea level.
Given the frequency of strong air currents picking up in the afternoon most flights into the airport are scheduled in the morning.
A night landing facility was created at the airport by fixing navigational lighting facilities on the runway at a cost of 99 million yuan (US $ 13.2 million) only in 2007, after the airport was built in 1965. This adds to the handling capacity of the airport by about 40%. The night landing facility at the airport was commissioned on November 14, 2007 with the landing of an Airbus A319 aircraft of Air China carrying 90 passengers. This facility was made operational initially once a week on Wednesdays from Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in Sichuan Province. With this facility the airport plans to handle 1.1 million passengers every year by 2010, as against 1.005 million in 2007.
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