December 7, 2024

Airports in China Hew to an Unswerving Flight Path

New arrivals are whisked on electronic walkways through a bright, spacious airport terminal that features elegant lounges, free Wi-Fi, speedy security checks and an efficient baggage handling system.

This is what the best airports now look like in the world’s second-largest economy.

Three years after it opened, Terminal 2 at Hongqiao International Airport in Shanghai stands as a testament to China’s economic ambitions, and to its unique approach to infrastructure development.

With extraordinary government support, Shanghai built a massive airport terminal in 32 months as part of a $9 billion transportation hub that connects the air terminal with the city’s buses, subway platforms and a new high-speed railway network.

“They know how to build things and how to do it efficiently,” said Jeffrey N. Thomas, chief executive of Landrum Brown, an American firm that helped design the new Shanghai terminal. “That area went from plans on a piece of paper to a complex that has 14 million square feet in less than four years. That’s hard to do.”

At a time when many American airports are falling into disrepair, China is quickening its air travel development, with plans to build nearly 100 more airports by 2015, including some at high altitudes, where special landing gear is required. Many of those airports are expected to lose money, but that hasn’t deterred the government, which views the expansion of infrastructure as vital to economic development.

China’s big-city airports are already colossal. Last year, Beijing Capital International Airport handled 81 million passengers, up from 27 million in 2002.

This year, it could surpass Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport to become the world’s busiest.

In Shanghai, Pudong Airport — which operates 25 miles east of Hongqiao as the city’s international gateway — has so many flights it plans to add a fourth and fifth runway, something few other airports in the world possess.

The quality and speed with which China builds its big city airports is impressive. But whether China holds any lessons for airport development in America, or Europe for that matter, is unclear, analysts say.

China’s building programs are supported by an authoritarian political system that brooks no challenges. When the government decides to build or expand an airport, there are no public hearings or any public protests of note.

And while economists ponder the long-term consequences of that decision-making process, this country’s leaders push ahead with new megaprojects.

“There’s a pro-investment bias here, partly because the country still has so much surplus labor, which makes it a lot cheaper to build,” said Louis Kuijs, an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland based in Hong Kong. “And this is a country that knows how to build. Look at the Great Wall!”

Terminal 2 at Hongqiao Airport is one of those “this could only happen in China” developments. With Terminal 1 congested, the city announced plans in 2006 for a new transportation hub to cover 10 square miles, a project that when complete is likely to be the world’s largest transit hub with about 1.1 million passengers a day.

To build it, the city cleared 10,000 residents from a huge plot of land west of Hongqiao by building new apartments for them a few miles away. Because the state owns all land in China, and residents have little bargaining power, local governments and developers often benefit from lower development costs.

And in the case of the transportation hub, once the land was cleared, state-run banks lined up to lend money to the project.

“The relocation and acquiring of land this size, only China can do it,” said Cao Longjin, general manager of Shanghai Rainbow Investments, a state-run company that helped develop the hub. “It’s a miracle.”

When China went on an earlier airport-building spree in the 1980s and early 1990s, things didn’t go quite so smoothly. The airports tended to be poorly designed and minimally functional, and usually lost money.

John Schwartz contributed reporting from New York.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/business/global/shanghais-new-air-terminal-sets-the-pace-for-speed-and-ambition.html?partner=rss&emc=rss