A woman looks at her phone at Beijing’s international airport
China’s economic planner announced its approval on construction of a new airport in Beijing on Monday, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The project will involve 79.98 billion yuan (USD13.11 billion) of investment and take about five years, a statement from the National Development and Reform Commission revealed.
The airport is designed to be able to handle 72 million passengers, 2 million tons of cargo and mail, and 620,000 planes in 2025, it said.
It is expected to meet Beijing’s rising demand for air transportation and help achieve balanced development in the capital’s southern and northern areas, it said.
The new airport will be built in southern Beijing’s Daxing District, which borders Hebei Province. Yet according to an article that appeared in yesterday’s Financial Times, some commentators have questioned the wisdom of an entirely new airport in such a remote location.
China has built scores of new airports in recent years but barely a quarter of the 200 facilities currently in operation are making any money, with about 150 surviving on government subsidies, the head of Chinese civil aviation said this month.
The new Beijing airport is just the latest in a string of megaprojects approved in recent months aimed more at boosting construction activity to support sagging growth than providing essential infrastructure.
Despite several expansions, Beijing’s existing airport has struggled to cope with the volume and growth in passenger and cargo traffic, and last year saw 83.7m passengers pass through even though the facility was designed to handle only 76m, the FT revealed.
Beijing has the world’s busiest airport after Atlanta in the US but it consistently rates as the worst airport in the world in terms of delays. In some months, less than 20 per cent of flights out of Beijing are able to leave on time, according to data from Flightstats.
China’s growing middle class is fueling a travel boom in the world’s second-largest economy. As detailed by Bloomberg, air-travel demand in Asia is projected to expand 5.7 percent in the four years through 2017, the second-fastest pace in the world, with routes within or connected to China being the single largest driver, according to an International Air Transport Association study last year. MDT
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