Airportman.id – Beijing Daxing International Airport is the largest airport in the People's Republic of China and, in the future, will be one of the busiest airports in the world. In the first phase, the airport has a capacity of 72 million passengers per year, and in the next stage, the airport will expand to 100 million passengers per year in 2040. The capacity of the first phase is estimated to be achieved within 5-10 years since the airport started operating.

The construction of this airport began in 2014 until it was operated on September 30, 2019, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the founding of China. This airport planning took no less than three years since 2011. The airport masterplan design was prepared by an airport planning consultant from the Netherlands, NACO. Meanwhile, the passenger terminal design was carried out by a French consultant, ADP Ingeneire, in collaboration with Zaha Hadid Architect Consultants.

The airport, located 67 km from Beijing City, costs no less than $17.4 billion or around Rp. 250 trillion. With the operation of Beijing Daxing Airport, Beijing Capital International Airport is no longer Beijing's main airport after 80 years of operation.

Beijing-Daxing Airport is a hub airport for several Chinese airlines, including Air China Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, China Southern Airlines, etc. The number of airlines that make this airport their hub airport will result in a high demand for the number of parking stands needed for their RON (Remain Over Night) parking fleet.

The large capacity of this airport is certainly inseparable from the very high need for air transportation in the country. With the largest population in the world (1.4 billion people in 2020), and the country with the third-largest area in the world, China recorded the number of aircraft passenger movements reaching 660 million passengers in 2019. This number of passenger movements is equivalent to three times the number of aircraft passenger movements in Indonesia in 2019.

To serve the movement of passengers in the first phase of 72 million passengers per year, Beijing-Daxing Airport is equipped with a passenger terminal covering an area of ​​700,000 m2. This passenger terminal is the largest single passenger terminal in the world. With a size equivalent to 2.5 times the T3 passenger terminal of Soekarno Hatta-Cengkareng Airport, Zaha Hadid, the terminal architect, designed the building mass with a finger pier concept that resembles a starfish, equipped with five branches or piers as the passenger boarding gate area. Overall, this terminal is equipped with 79 departure gates, 8 of which serve the largest passenger aircraft in the world today, the Airbus A380. With the concept of building mass like this, it will reduce the walking distance of passengers from the check-in area to the boarding gate area compared to if the terminal is designed with a linear concept like the T3 CGK terminal.

The airport has five runways and an apron with 268 parking stands. Of the five runways, three are the main runway directly connected to the starfish-shaped passenger terminal and two other runways to support the military, cargo, and MRO (Maintenance Repair and Overhaul) functions.

Of the 268 parking stands, 79 of them are contact stands directly connected to the passenger terminal. The rest are remote parking stands; the farthest distance to the passenger terminal can reach two kilometers. Even though it has 79 gates equipped with Passenger Boarding Bridge (PBB), this number, according to the author, is still not ideal when compared to the need to provide passenger boarding gates. Assuming 70% of departing passengers and 70% of arriving passengers using PBB and assuming peak hour reaches 25,000 pax when passenger traffic reaches 72 million passengers per year, this airport requires at least 100 PBB.

This airport has four runways with dimensions of 3800 meters x 60 meters with threshold numbers 18-36, 17R-35L and 17L-35R, 11L-29R, and one runway with dimensions of 3,400 meters x 60 meters with threshold numbers 01R-19L. If viewed from Google Earth as of mid-2020, runway number 17R-35L appears to be marked with a cross indicating that the runway is not yet operational.

With 8 rapid taxiways, runway 17R-35L and 01R-19L are expected to serve narrow-body aircraft take-off and landing movements. Meanwhile, Runway 17L-35R with fewer rapid exit taxiways, which is only four units, is estimated to accommodate wide-body aircraft take-off and landing movements. Although, of course, these two runways can be used for narrow-body to wide-body aircraft alternately because they have a runway length that meets the requirements for both types of aircraft, and the runway PCN strength is also estimated to be equivalent. However, the separation of take-off and landing movements based on the aircraft type is useful for increasing the runway capacity. With the same type of aircraft, for example, narrow-body or wide-body, the distance between the aircraft during approach landing and take-off can be closer when compared to the distance between aircraft of different sizes so that the runway capacity can be increased. In addition, the large number of rapid exit taxiways or perpendicular taxiways further reduces the runway occupancy time for each aircraft.

Meanwhile, runway 11L-29R is used to support cargo and MRO business activities or can be used as a backup runway if they cannot operate the main runway. Runway 18-36 is a runway for military aviation activities.

In the ultimate development stage, the construction of runway 01L-29R with a length of 3,400 meters and runway 11R-29L with a length of 3,300 meters, and the addition of apron capacity to around 390 parking stands. For the development of land-side facilities, one of which is the construction of a passenger terminal on the south side of the airport area with an area of ​​​​about 300,000 m2 so that these two terminals have a total capacity of up to 100 million passengers per year.