FROM his 29th-floor office in the new Bank of China building in Macau, Professor Antonio Diogo Pinto can see an airport emerging from the sea. And for the first time since he arrived 20 months ago, the chairman of the Macau Airport Franchise Co (CAM) can look out at the hundreds of small barges carrying sand from China to the reclamation area near Taipa Island, and feel confident they are doingsomething constructive. Ground-breaking talks between Portugal and China in Lisbon last week mean that all outstanding issues regarding the building of the airport have been agreed, Professor Pinto said. ''Which means that we can now go ahead and make sure the job gets finished: it's all up to us now,'' he said. The main sticking point in the lengthy diplomatic negotiations had been the air traffic details. ''But we have now reached an agreement with the PRC and Portugal: Macau will have the right to make bilateral [air traffic] agreements with any country in the world,'' Professor Pinto said, adding that Taiwan was probably ''a special case''. Ultimately the Chinese authorities would build a central air traffic co-ordination centre for all the Pearl River airports, including Chek Lap Kok, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. ''It is a relief: we always knew that the airport would be built - after all, one-third of the work has already been done - but we also always had to remember that an airport is nothing without airspace,'' Professor Pinto said. The project group could now start producing brochures and publicity material: ''We couldn't do that before - there was too much uncertainty.'' In a separate arrangement, CAM had now successfully sourced the full sum of 7.3 billion patacas in bank and export credit loans needed to complete the project, Professor Pinto said. The 3.2 billion patacas, which was causing some financial headaches earlier in the year, had now been found, largely through loans from the Bank of China, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) and Banco Nacional Ultramarino. More than 2,000 people were now working on the site, with numbers set to double by the end of the year, Professor Pinto said. ''And we have already moved more than 20 million cubic metres of sand, which means that we have passed the half-way mark on that part of the project.'' Typhoon Koryn last week shifted some of the sand from an unprotected 150-metre-long sand-bank, ''but we factored typhoons into our calculations, and we are still on schedule'', he said. Professor Pinto said he was confident the airport would be completed on target by mid-1995. ''I am sure that one day in June or July 1995 I will be on a passenger jet that will take off from Macau International Airport,'' he said.
