China Unveils Starfish Shaped World’s Largest and Busiest Airport

In 2008 just before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese capital unveiled an airport terminal that has the capacity of about 200 football fields in its floor space with a capacity of 50 million passengers a year is built at the cost $4 billion. Now, what is coming next is just double its capacity.

Engineers are giving a final touch to what is going to be the largest and busiest airports in the world. Designed by the late British architect Zaha Hadid, the phoenix shaped Beijing Daxing International Airport is going to open in September.

The airport built at the cost of $12 billion is going to serve more than 100 million passengers every year, which is going to challenge to the traffic volumes of the present busiest airport in the world, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

The Daxing International Airport is raised on a farmland that is about 30 miles south of central Beijing, which is also the new transport hub of the country. It also signifies the growth of China in civil aviation, which is expected to overtake the United States as the largest infrastructure market by 2020s.

In the year 2014, the construction of the airport started. It is among the top priorities of President Xi Jinping, whose government continues to spend on infrastructure and transportation as key drivers of development. In the year 2018, the country has invested $120 billion and $12 billion in railways and civil aviation respectively.

Yi Wei, who is the deputy manager of the Daxing airport’s planning department, says that the main airport of China now is Beijing Capital International Airport, which has been straining because of its capacity for years. He says, “It’s heavily overloaded. We estimate, basically, that about 400 flights every day are held up because of air traffic control approval”.

The number of Chinese fliers has been rising faster than airports can keep up. Therefore the Daxing airport will be a great relief in managing the present situation and which is going to put it among the world’s busiest airports.

China’s annual passenger traffic has reached 1.264 billion in the year 2018, which is up 10.2 percent from the previous year, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China. Meanwhile, according to Airport Council International, Atlanta’s airport handled 107 million passengers in 2018, the most in the world followed by Beijing’s International airport at 101 million and Dubai International Airport at 89 million.

According to the International Air Transport Association, China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest aviation market by 2022, two years before previously predicted.

The airport is nicknamed “the Starfish” for its shape and design is going to have five concourses spiraling out of the primary hall. At the edge of each line, five traditional Chinese gardens will be built where passengers can wait for their flights.