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PART OF A vanity airport built by toppled Sri Lankan strongman Mahinda Rajapakse will be used as a rice storage warehouse to reduce losses after failing to take off, officials said this week.
Rajapakse International aiport, located in the remote farming outpost of Hambantota 250 kilometres (180 miles) from Colombo, has been shunned by airlines after setting planes on a collision course with migrating birds.
The 550-employee airport in the ex-president’s constituency has become a highlight on a “Rajapakse white elephant tour” run by local guides.
It operates at a huge loss and is used only by one airline, low-cost carrier FlyDubai, with just a handful of passengers arriving each week.
The near-empty airport has provided a surprise boon to rice farmers, however, after a bumper harvest left them short of shortage space.
“A cargo terminal was released to the (state-run rice buyer) Paddy Marketing Board to store the rice harvest from the Hambantota region,” said an airport official who asked not to be named.
The first truckload of rice arrived today and has already unloaded at the empty cargo terminal.
Police said the inaugural delivery was met with unrest as dozens of airport employees loyal to Rajapakse protested against the rice storage plan.
“They should be happy that at least trucks are landing there to make the airport viable,” a senior police officer told AFP.
Built on a migratory route for birds, the airport soon proved notorious for plane-bird collisions after opening in 2013. The first flight to land shattered its windshield after being struck.
National carrier Sri Lankan Airlines was under orders from Rajapakse to land at the $210 million hub. But it halted flights immediately after Rajapakse lost January’s presidential election to Maithripala Sirisena.
Rajapakse spent lavishly on infrastructure, with huge vanity projects including a deep sea port, six-lane highways, an international conference centre, a cricket stadium and a dry-zone botanical garden.
The projects were criticised for ignoring feasibility studies and environmental warnings.
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In fairness Gav there still is an awful lot of porn on it.
I remember most of these alright… Just one thing about number 14 though… irlgov looks like it was just one image. must have taken forever to load on a 14.4k modem!
Lycos was the other search engine site.
No P45.net ?
For shame !!
Another was yahoos geocities sites everywhere!
Ah good old geocities, was far better before yahoo bought it and made shite of it
Ah good old geocities, was far better before yahoo bought it and made shite of it….
TheJournal.ie slide put the cherry on the cake :D
Now that’s the Apple I hate and remember well.
I have a hunch that you have an android phone.
Did you ever have to use their products in the 90s?
Indigo….sure wasn’t it better than robbing banks?
Nice little ad for Anglo Irish bank on the 7th picture. Whatever happened them I wonder? I’m sure it’s all swell!
Ask Jeeves was a popular one with me and my chums
Good to see the Irish Independent has decided to stay with the old look and spread it out over all the regional titles they have ruined
Anyone recall flunk.net??
http://www.thickpaddy.com/cv/flunk_net.htm
For people wanting to check out a few old versions of websites for themselves check out http://archive.org/. A great resource for seeing what it was like back then!
Coming in way late with these but one worth doing a comparison on is excite.com. No change at all. The other, hotwired.com, the old search engine is now wired.com. Hotwired was the business in the day.
Anyone know what happened to the people behind hell.com back in the 90′s? That site really pushed the boundaries of what was possible then.
Reminds you of how simple an idea Twitter was.
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