Belfast City Airport expects passenger traffic to grow by more than 20,000 people next year to record levels following the opening of its new facilities close to the heart of the city centre.
A new £22 million sterling (€35.5 million) airport will open at the end of this month close to the site of the original airport that was opened in the late 1970s by Bombardier Aerospace.
Mr John Doran, managing director of Belfast City Airport, expects passenger growth in the region of 2 per cent in the current year but is confident that long term the airport can grow its passenger numbers by an additional 45,000 people.
Northern Ireland currently has three airports, Belfast City, Belfast International and Derry City Airport.
Belfast International, Belfast City Airport's chief rival, is located 25 minutes outside the city and is the largest airport in the north.
On average more than three million passengers use Belfast International each year and it handles the bulk of larger aircraft, freight and leisure traffic.
TBI plc, the owners of Belfast International Airport, had originally objected to the development of the new Belfast City Airport arguing that Northern Ireland would be best served if the two airports were to merge.
Belfast International Airport maintains that one airport would develop a critical mass and attract more new airline operators to come to the north.
Mr Doran rejects this claim and believes two airports in the north creates competition for airline passengers.
Belfast City Airport currently handles around 1.3 million passengers per annum; the new airport has the capacity to handle up to 2.1 million passengers.
Mr Doran is confident that Belfast City can achieve growth of 3 to 5 per cent over the next 10 years.
"Belfast City Airport is located within 15 minutes of 50 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland. We have a clear role for this airport because most of our traffic is business people travelling to point-to-point destinations.
"We are not interested in the charter market nor are we interested in the cargo market and we have not in the past been interested in the low-cost operator market. We are driven by the business traveller and secondly the leisure traveller," Mr Doran said.
The new airport has been designed to minimise the amount of time passengers spend arriving, checking in and walking to departure gates in order to enable the airport to process people quicker.
Car parking is located close to the airport terminal and the distances between check-in desks and departure lounges have been reduced compared with the previous airport's facilities.
Extended business lounges are also one of the key features of the new airport to attract further operators to service new Northern Ireland to UK and possibly European routes.
Mr Doran said: "We would like to bring on a Belfast City to Gatwick route and we are also looking at the possibility of servicing new European routes such as Belfast to Paris."
