The incredible new £35bn airport set to become one of the world's busiest

Beijing Daxing International Airport, China’s newest operational airport, is located just over 28 miles south of the city centre in the Daxing area, a southern suburb of Beijing.

With its unique shape, it serves as one of the most impressive construction projects in recent history. It is also a significant transportation hub for the region with the fastest-growing demand for international travel.

Nicknamed “the starfish”, it was built with the specific purpose of relieving the congestion at the capital’s other airport, Beijing Capital International Airport. The facility features a 700,000-metre-squared terminal, the world’s largest single-building airport terminal.

It was planned to be able to handle 120 to 200 million passengers a year, which, if capacity were fully used, would make it the world’s busiest airport by passenger traffic, surpassing the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta.

Beijing Daxing Airport is one of the latest of several massive construction projects undertaken in recent years by China. The airport was been built within a remarkably short span of five years - construction began in December 2014 and it became operational in September 2019.

It covers an expanse of 6,620 acres and has four civilian runways and one military runway. However, according to The Guardian, there are already plans to expand this to seven runways. The building features a central atrium supported by eight C-shaped columns, each of which has a 106-metre-wide skylight at the top.

Despite its size, the journey from security to the furthest gate is only 600 metres, thanks to its unusual design.

The first phase of the airport project, according to Chinese media articles from 2021, was designed with a target of 72 million passengers, two million tons of cargo and mail and 620,000 aircraft movements in the long term. Technological features include radio frequency identification for baggage tracking, geothermal heat pumps for heating and cooling and facial recognition security access.

In 2023, Beijing Daxing Airport welcomed over 39.4 million passengers, a 283.5 percent increase from the previous year as the country continued to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. By almost doubling the number of runways, the airport plans to have capacity for 100 million passengers annually by 2040, reported The Guardian, eventually making it the busiest in the world.

The airport’s development was fully integrated into the nation’s evolving transportation network, aligning with China’s infrastructure advancement. The airport’s master plan was prepared by the Netherlands Airport Consultants (NACO) and features a ground transportation hub providing the airport with public transport links to high-speed rail, metro, expressways, bus routes and inter-airport transportation systems.

Two underground railway stations and three metro stations were built beneath the terminal building, but so far only one of each is in operation.

The airport opened six days before the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China - in a ceremony attended by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Upon opening, the Beijing Nanyuan Airport, the oldest in China having opened in 1910, was closed on the same day.

British Airways currently has a route from London Heathrow, however, this flight is set to be halted in October 2024, Reuters reported.

While Daxing is the biggest single terminal building in the world, Istanbul International Airport is the biggest airport in terms of passenger traffic. Meanwhile, King Fahd International Airport in Saudi Arabia is by far the largest airport in terms of land area, nearly equaling the size of NYC’s five boroughs and is seven times larger than Manchester.