Saudi Arabia ditches Mecca airport plans

Plans for an airport in Saudi Arabia’s Muslim pilgrimage city, Mecca, have been crushed as the General Authority for Civil Aviation (GACA) rejected proposals for the project this week.

The proposed airport was rejected because of the distance that airports are required to be from the city center.

Mecca has become one of the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities in the Muslim world, with more than 13 million Muslims visiting Mecca annually mostly for the Hajj pilgrimage.

Other difficulties towards having an airport in the city were the mountainous geography of the area and the close proximity of Mecca to Jeddah, the major urban center of western Saudi Arabia on the coast of the Red Sea.

Prince Khaled Al Faisal, Governor of the Makkah province, said that plans to build an airport were scrapped and the current travel bases are sufficient enough.

“King Abdulaziz International Airport and Jeddah Islamic Port serve Mecca by air and sea. So there is no need for a new airport in Mecca,” Prince Faisal said in a statement to the media.

(Eman El-Shenawi, a writer at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at: [email protected].)