This Day, That Year

Item from Aug 17, 1999, in China Daily: China’s largest airport expansion project, the new terminal building (T2) in Beijing, is designed to handle 35 million passengers by the year 2005, and allow 190,000 flights to arrive and depart from the airport annually.

Thanks to the country’s rapid economic development over the past few decades, the number of inbound and outbound travelers has soared.

Beijing and Shanghai remain popular destinations, with the airports in the two cities ranked among the world’s busiest.

More than 94 million passengers flew through Beijing Capital International Airport last year, making it the world’s second-busiest passenger airport, according to the Airports Council International’s preliminary passenger data.

Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport ranked ninth, with more than 66 million passengers last year, and a growth rate of 10 percent in 2015, according to the Airports Council International.

To ease the traffic pressure in the capital, a new terminal (T3) opened in 2008.

A new airport in Daxing district is expected to be operational in 2019, which will handle 72 million passengers, 2 million metric tons of cargo and 620,000 flights annually after 2025.

The new hub includes four runways, 150 parking aprons for passenger jets, 24 parking aprons for cargo aircraft, 14 maintenance areas and a terminal building.

The project is estimated to cost 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) and construction began in 2014.