Daxing International Airport

Beijing’s new airport opens on September 30^th 

Designed by Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid, the airport terminals cover over a million square metres.

It cost RMB 80 billion (£9.3 billion) and took five years to build.

Beijing Daxing International Airport will handle 45 million passengers annually by 2021, 72 million by 2025 and 100 million passengers a year by 2040.

China Southern, China Eastern, Beijing Capital Airlines and China United Airlines will be among the domestic carriers to move to the new facility.

The airport is 50 kilometres south of the city in the centre of the Jingjinji region and near the Xiongan New Area.

It is also classed as a transport hub with new motorways, a new subway line and a high-speed rail link that travels at 160 km/h.

Two lanes of the new four-lane-motorway connecting the city and the airport are reserved for self-driving cars.

The airport has four runways and will handle 1570 flights per day by 2025.

British Airways announced it would be the first international airline to move its Beijing base to Daxing. BA will use the new airport for most of their inbound and outbound flights between Beijing and Heathrow from 27 October 2019.

China is set to overtake the United States as the world’s largest aviation market by the mid-2020s.

The total number of air travellers in the country is expected to jump to 1.6 billion a year by 2037, from 600 million in 2017.

China has 235 airports but plans to have 450 by 2035.

By 2035, China will handle a quarter of all global airline passengers.