Media reports say China’s President Xi Jinping yesterday inaugurated a second international airport for the Chinese capital with the world's biggest terminal ahead of celebrations of the Communist Party's 70th anniversary in power.
Xi stressed that the new airport, which was built in less than five years and put into operation smoothly, has shown China's prowess in engineering construction, according to Xinhua.
It is also a display of the political advantages of the CPC leadership and China's socialist system that can mobilize all sources to make great achievements, said Xi.
Beijing Daxing International Airport is designed to handle 72 million passengers a year. Located on the capital's south side, it was built in less than five years at a cost of 120 billion yuan ($17 billion).
The airline's first commercial flight, a China Southern Airlines plane bound for the southern province of Guangdong, took off Wednesday afternoon, state broadcaster CCTV reported. Six more flights took off later for Shanghai and other destinations.
The main Beijing airport, located in the city's northeast, is the world's second-busiest after Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and is nearing capacity.
Designed by the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, Daxing includes a terminal billed as the world's biggest at 11 million square feet, CBS News reported. Despite that, its builders say travelers will need to walk no more than some 610 meters to reach any boarding gate.
The vast, star-shaped airport is about 48 kilometers south of downtown Beijing. It has four runways, with plans for as many as three more.
Given the distance from central Beijing, the new airport required a lot of investment to connect it to the capital. When you add the cost of new road and rail links and other infrastructure, the total cost of the project hit a whopping US$63 billion, CBS News says.
Carriers including British Airways and state-owned China Southern, the country's biggest airline by passengers, reportedly plan to move to Daxing from Beijing Capital International Airport.
