Qingdao airport gets the go-ahead
A new airport project in Qingdao, Shandong province, whose goal is to link the eastern coastal city to Northeast Asia, especially Japan and South Korea, has been given the nod by Chinese authorities, with construction work on the first phase, with a budget of around 38.12 billion yuan ($6.23 billion), expected to start soon.
The airport location is in Jiaozhou, on the outskirts of Qingdao. The first phase calls for two 3,600-meter parallel runways and a 450,000-square-meter terminal, to be built over the next four years. Upon completion, the airport should be able to handle 35 million passengers, 500,000 tons of cargo, and 300,000 aircraft movements annually.
This is a 4F-Class International Civil Aviation Organization airport, which can handle the Boeing 380 and Boeing 787, the world’s largest aircraft.
The longer phase, planned for completion by 2045, will have two more 3,200-meter closely-spaced, parallel runways and a terminal area of 700,000 sq m, which can handle 55 million passengers, 1 million tons of cargo, and 450,000 aircraft movements, annually.
Qingdao also plans to build a larger traffic network centered on the airport, including high-speed railway lines, subways, urban rail, and highways so that it will take just one hour for passengers to get from the airport to any part of Qingdao, and 1.5-2 hours for them, or cargo for that matter, to get to any place on the Shandong Peninsula.
The airport is expected to be ready for operation by 2025, if all goes according to plan.
