- Gordon Dumoulin
New Beijing International Airport ready in less than 5 years
The new Beijing Daxing International Airport has completed construction last weekend, ready for trial runs. The airport has been built in less than 5 years and is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of September.
The airport will be the central hub of the Jingjinji Metropolitan Region (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei) with direct high speed train connections from the airport to Beijing, Tianjin, Xiong'An New Area and other major urban areas in Hebei.
With a long term capacity to handle 100 million passengers per year, Beijing will have a total annual airfreight passenger capacity of approximately 170 million together with the existing Beijing International Capital airport (second largest airport in the world today) which was opened in 2008 for the Olympic Games.
As Chinese air-traffic numbers continue to soar, the country's aviation infrastructure has become more and more crowded. Annual passenger traffic reached 1.26 billion in 2018, up 10.2 percent from the previous year, China’s Civil Aviation Administration says. China will overtake the United States as the world's largest avaiation market by 2022, two years earlier than previously predicted, according to the International Air Transport Association.
The person behind the airport’s innovative design is the late Iraqi-born British architect Zaha Hadid. Hadid was the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize and is known for projects ranging from the MAXXI Museum of Contemporary Art and Culture in Rome to the London Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympics. Hadid passed away in 2016 when she still had 36 projects on her plate, including the 2022 World Cup Stadium in Qatar.
