Noida International Airport: Engineering the future

More than an airport

Noida International Airport (NIA) is designed for growth over the next four decades from an initial capacity of 12 million passengers annually, to approximately 70 million, making it one of India’s largest aviation gateways.

As Infrastructure Design Consultant, Ramboll has supported our client from concept to delivery. By bringing together aviation specialists and multidisciplinary experts from across Ramboll’s geographies and markets, the company is helping develop infrastructure that is integrated, resilient, sustainable, and designed for expansion.

Ramboll’s delivery into the project demonstrates what can be achieve when aviation planning, engineering, digital collaboration, and sustainability are integrated from the outset.

Designing an airport built to expand

Central to the delivery was ensuring the infrastructure could accommodate growing capacity, new technologies, and operating requirements in an environment increasingly impacted by climate change, whilst maintaining reliability and performance in t work areas including:

• Multidisciplinary expertise in airside and landside facilities, from concept through detailed design.
• Runways, taxiways, aprons, GSE areas, ancillary buildings, airside roads, and associated infrastructure.
• Contributing to access and internal roads, parking, drainage, and connectivity between facilities.
• Site-wide infrastructure and utilities, including electrical systems, water and wastewater infrastructure, treatment facilities, ICT networks, and ancillary buildings.

Bringing these disciplines together has allowed the airport’s infrastructure to be considered as one interconnected system rather than a collection of individual assets.

Global expertise, delivered as one team

Ramboll experts across disciplines collaborated to create an integrated and seamless delivery approach for the client, combining international aviation experience with an understanding of local conditions, construction requirements, and supply chains.

The project was delivered through the challenging conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, making close digital collaboration vital.

A BIM-led design approach helped teams coordinate complex interfaces across airfield, landside, technical infrastructure, and utilities. It enabled disciplines to work together effectively despite geographic separation, identify design interfaces earlier, and maintain coordination against demanding project timelines.

Embedding sustainability into infrastructure

Ramboll supported the development of a sustainability strategy and roadmap towards net zero, identifying priority areas for reducing the airport’s carbon footprint and translating these ambitions into practical infrastructure solutions.

The work considered areas including energy and fuel, water, waste, materials, greenhouse gas emissions, and infrastructure. It also involved evaluating implementation approaches and balancing sustainability ambitions with constructability, operational reliability, local availability, and supply-chain realities.

“On a project of this scale, sustainability has to be practical and deliverable. Our approach has been to balance carbon reduction with local availability and supply-chain realities, while ensuring constructability, operational reliability and long-term value,” says Swati Garg, Project Director, Transport, Asia Pacific at Ramboll.

“Sustainable solutions must also be robust, constructible, and capable of performing reliably throughout the asset’s life,” she adds.

Considering future changes in climate, water and drainage strategies have been important elements of the airport’s infrastructure planning. Ramboll’s approach combined hydrological modelling, system redundancy, staged storage, and engineered infrastructure with nature-based solutions to strengthen resilience against intense rainfall events, storm conditions, and operational surges.

Drawing on Ramboll’s international experience allowed teams to bring relevant global practices into the project while adapting solutions to the Indian context.