Mumbai, India —

After decades of bottlenecks and delays, Mumbai, one of the world’s most crowded cities, finally has a second airport. For travelers, the new Navi Mumbai International Airport promises shorter lines, more flights and a smoother start or finish to their trip than before. For the city, long throttled by a single overburdened airport, it’s an engineering feat.

The airport has been nearly 20 years in the making, a process that involved flattening hills, diverting rivers and bridging creeks. Phase one alone gives the city a terminal built to handle 20 million passengers annually, immediately easing the strain on Mumbai’s existing airport, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International, or BOM.

In 2019, BOM handled 48.83 million passengers. And today, as one of Asia’s busiest air

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