Dear Guest,

As the Chairman of Airport and Aviation Services (Sri Lanka) (Private) Limited, I take great pleasure in welcoming you to Sri Lanka Airports.

It is a great privilege for me to be appointed to head the state-owned company that operates, maintains, and develops all civil airports in Sri Lanka.

The company that has been entrusted to me is performing extremely well both financially and operationally. We have been a model for a profitable state-owned establishment. We are also a much sought-after state-sector employer. Yet, the challenges that are looming ahead of us are enormous.

As the Chairman of the company, we had to face a number of challenges during the period of the global COVID-19 pandemic which devasted the global aviation industry in 2020 especially. We had been performing before the pandemic and I came to the picture at a time when our operational nerve center, the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) was facing a severe capacity crunch with the steady and unprecedented growth in passenger movements and cargo volume. In addition, as the air navigation services provider for a large and mostly oceanic air space, we were faced with challenges in catering to increasingly congested air traffic flow. The air traffic in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to register the highest growth in the world in the coming decade and we need to keep abreast and be on par with the state-of-the-art technologies that are essential and are already being deployed in other parts of the region. Acquiring and deploying those technologies as well as training and retaining personnel to man them are formidable challenges. On top of all these, we need to cope with current threats to the civil aviation industry both globally and locally. It is a great pleasure to see that Sri Lanka’s aviation industry is bouncing back along with the global aviation industry after a turbulent period of two years. Whilst continuing to be a dependable revenue earner for the state, we wish to work in tandem with other stakeholders of the industry to make the aviation industry, tourism industry, international trade, and investment promotion more lucrative, thereby contributing to the national economy.

We envision to be the ‘Friendliest aviation partner in global connectivity towards a sustainable economy while ensuring competitive, safe aviation services and superlative guest experience with best practices towards stakeholder satisfaction. I wish you a memorable guest experience as you traverse through the service chain of our airports.

Major General (Rtd.) G. A. Chandrasiri  RWP USP VSV ndc psc
CHAIRMAN
Airport and Aviation Services (Sri Lanka) (Private) Limited.