China is building an incredible new airport on reclaimed land in Jinzhou Bay to create a new major travel hub.
The Dalian Jinzhouwan International Airport will span a 7.7-square-mile island, feature four runways, and an impressive 90,000-square-metre (22-acre) passenger terminal.
Once finished, it will become the world’s largest airport built on an artificial island, surpassing both Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) and Japan’s Kansai Airport (KIX) which measure 4.8 and 4.1 square miles respectively.
The massive airport is set to welcome some 80 million passengers each year across 540,000 flights.
“The country’s largest offshore airport is rising slowly from the sea level like the sunrise in the east,” the airport said in a statement on the Chinese social media platform, WeChat.
The airport is being built north of Dalian city in the Liaoning Province, northeastern China. This coastal region – home to 7.5 million people – boasts impressive beaches and architecture and is close to other tourist sites, including Xinghai Square and Dalian Forest Zoo.
Its proximity to both Japan and South Korea have made it a long-standing transport hub for China.
It will replace the existing Dalian Zhoushuizi International Airport as the city’s main airport which opened in 1927 and has no more room to grow after successive expansions. In 2018 the airport handled nearly 19 million passengers, making it the busiest airport in northeastern China and the 24th busiest nationwide.
The airport was officially announced in 2012, though construction had already begun in April 2011. While the airport was originally planned to open in 2018, it is expected to open to the public in 2035, according to Metro.
The airport is designed to handle aircraft as big as the Airbus A380 and is projected to cost 26.3 billion yuan (£2.8 billion).
The airport is being built in two stages. The first will see the construction of the huge terminal building and two runways, designed to handle 31 million passengers and 650,000 tons of cargo annually. Two more runways will be built in the second phase, which will increase the capacity to 80 million passengers.
Some experts criticised its cost, warning that the cost of constructing and maintaining runways on reclaimed land could be 20 times more than inland airports.
The project has also not been without its issues: “There have been great challenges to the construction,” Li Xiang, chief engineer of Dalian Airport Construction and Development Co., Ltd., told state-run local media in October, “as the project has complex geological conditions, high drilling difficulty and high demand in quality with a tight construction schedule”.
The country is building hundreds of new airports and expanding existing facilities to meet the growth of air travel. In 2019, Chinese officials said the country would need 450 airports by 2035 to keep up with demand, CNN Travel reported.