Beijing Daxing Int'l Airport to begin operation in Sept

The Beijing Daxing International Airport is expected to be completed on June 30 and put into use before September 30, said Feng Zhenglin, Director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), according to People's Daily.

Feng Zhenglin made the statement during an interview after the opening meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress. The construction of the airport's main body has been completed, while the internal furnishing as well as equipment installation and testing are underway.

Ten of the 32 international airlines newly approved by the CAAC are from this new mega-airport, including the popular routes to Russia's St. Petersburg, South Korea's Busan and Egypt's Cairo, says a statement issued by the organisation.

"The new airport is expected to handle 45 million passengers annually by 2022 and 72 million by 2025," Feng said.

The CAAC head further said that with a vision of building a "safe, green, intelligent and humanistic" airport, the new aviation hub was constructed according to the standards for major modern international airports.

The airport, designed to become the world's largest, has a long-term plan to expand annual passenger capacity to 100 million.

Project manager of the main terminal construction Li Jianhua said that he and his team completed the world's most complicated and the largest mechanical and electrical installation last year.

They installed 247,000 sets of electro-mechanical devices, 1,800 kilometres of cables and wires, millions of connectors, and air hoses covering a total area of nearly 73 standard football pitches, to the core zone of the world's largest single terminal.

During the peak of construction, more than 8,000 workers were working simultaneously at the main terminal in a day, Li said.

The main terminal of the airport has a huge steel-framed roof that covers 180,000 square meters, the largest of its kind in the world. The constructors took only 80 days to install the big ceiling with the help of robotic measurement. The error procession was limited within one millimetre, which is nothing but a miracle, Li added.