PHOENIX RISING

Beijing's hugeley anticipated new Daxing International Airport has been designed with maximum passenger processing efficiency in mind.

- Jackie Chen

Forty-six kilometres south of Beijing’s city centre lies a golden phoenix, its wings spread as though ready to soar into the sky. This is the Chinese capital’s hugely anticipated second international airport, which finally began operations on September 25 and is poised to absorb the surging demand for air travel to and from the Chinese capital.

In 2018, the passenger volume of Beijing Capital International Airport – which since its opening in 1958 has been Beijing’s main commercial airport – reached over 100 million. Even with the benefit of three terminals and several rounds of expansion, this volume far exceeds the 83 million passengers per year for which the airport was designed. Indeed, Beijing Capital, located in the city’s northeast, is now the second busiest airport in the world by passenger volume, just after Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the United States.

“The government predicted a much longer life expectancy for the old Beijing Capital Airport, but it actually reached capacity much faster than anticipated,” says David Yu, adjunct professor of finance at New York University Shanghai and chairman of China Aviation Valuation Advisors.

Yu adds that it was not easy to decide on the location of the new airport, as there were many factors that needed to be taken into consideration. “Beijing is a pretty developed and populated city. Wherever the new airport was located, it needed to be a place a little bit farther from the city centre in order to accommodate its huge size. Also, Beijing Capital Airport will not be shut down after the new airport enters into service, so the issue of Beijing’s highly congested airspace needed to be resolved by locating Daxing sufficiently far away from Beijing Capital,” he says.