Achieving financial close was challenging for the Project Company, partly due to the fact that it was the first airport PPP contract signed by ANI according to the 2011 PPP law. From the Procuring Authority's point of view, a first financial close was reached in September 2015, however the contract did not stipulate the requirement to have a signed credit agreement between the project company and its lenders. To achieve this contractual milestone, the Project Company was not required to have committed financing in place; instead, it needed a letter of credit from its selected lenders to show their willingness to finance the project, which was not binding. In this case, the main lender is CAF, the Latin American development bank, who took some time to complete its due diligence, in particular on the project's social and environmental impact. Financing was finally agreed in March 2016, and in the meantime, the Project Company had to fund the project's operations using solely equity.

There were a number of challenges which arose during the construction phase of this project. The most significant of these was related to the airport master plan. Normally this would be made available to bidders during the procurement phase, to allow them to develop an understanding of the state of the airport at that point in time. On this project, an up-to-date master plan was not available, and therefore had to be developed during the pre-construction phase. The master plan was necessary in order to finalise the design and its completion led to, among other changes, a change of the cargo terminal location, the terminal expansion size and the location of the Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul area (MRO). Those changes did not have construction time or cost implications. The delay in developing and approving the master plan is currently the subject of a claim by the Project Company seeking a time extension, and at the time of writing, this claim was being assessed by the Procuring Authority. The time extension would allow the construction to be completed without breach of contract by December 2018.

At the time of writing the case study, construction is ongoing, and is due to finish at the end of 2018. There have been some delays, with certain elements which had been due to be completed in June 2018 but are now due to finish in December 2018; however, this has not extended the final completion date of the contract.

The other challenge during construction was related to the large amount of construction work which needed to be completed in a relatively short period of time, and which had to take place while the airport was fully operational. The capital expenditure for the project was divided into eight periods, the first of which covered the three years between financial close and June 2018. 60% of the capital works (by value) were to be completed in this period, which covers only 20% of the overall project timeframe. This also required the development and installation of important provisional facilities, which was costly.