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Beijing’s Hadid-designed $63bn airport opens

New hub has four runaways, is expected to handle up to 72 million people a year

- Reuters Beijing

Beijing’s new multi-billion dollar airport, Daxing Internatio­nal, was formally declared open by President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, days ahead of the 70th anniversar­y of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The 450 billion yuan ($63 billion) project, completed in less than five years, will give a boost to infrastruc­ture growth, flagging amid the biggest economic slowdown in decades, as China and the US remain locked in a trade war.

The airport was hailed as “a new powerful source of national developmen­t” at a ceremony overseen

AVIATION

by Xi in which top government officials, including He Lifeng, the head of state planning and vice premier, Han Zheng, participat­ed. The phoenix-shaped airport, abbreviate­d as PKX, is located in Beijing’s south and will help ease pressure on the existing Capital Internatio­nal Airport in the city’s northeast, where capacity constraint­s often cause flight delays.

Designed by the firm of Iraqiborn architect Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016, the new airport boasts four runaways and is expected to handle up to 72 million passengers a year by 2025, eventually reaching 100 million.

China aims to build Daxing, which is expected to become one of the world’s busiest airports, into a global aviation hub, as the country is forecast to overtake the US as the world’s largest aviation market by 2022.

Rising out of farmland, Daxing airport is about 46 kilometers away from Tiananmen Square, almost twice the distance from Capital airport to central Beijing.

It will also accommodat­e passengers from the neighborin­g areas of Hebei and Tianjin, linked by a sprawling network of high-speed and inter-city trains, metros and public buses. An express train from the airport will take about 20 minutes to reach the south of Beijing.

China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines are the main airlines at Daxing, while about 50 foreign airlines, including British Airways and Finnair , plan to move all or part of their operations in the next few quarters.

Flag carrier Air China won 10 percent of the capacity at Daxing. Against an initial plan for China Southern and China Eastern to move all operations to the new airport, with each getting 40 percent of its capacity, China Eastern has retained its highly profitable Beijing-Shanghai route out of the old airport.

The relocation of all airlines is set to be completed by winter 2021.

 ?? AFP ?? Workers stroll through the terminal building of the new Beijing Daxing Internatio­nal Airport ahead of its opening by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
AFP Workers stroll through the terminal building of the new Beijing Daxing Internatio­nal Airport ahead of its opening by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

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