World's Biggest Airport Opens in Beijing

"In the latest sign of its Olympic frenzy, Beijing has opened the world's biggest airport, an enormous dragon-shaped building 31/4 kilometres in length, built in record speed after the eviction of 10,000 villagers from the site.

The new terminal, almost 20-per-cent bigger than all five terminals of London's Heathrow Airport combined, features an ultra-modern baggage system and a Canadian-designed shuttle train to help people navigate its vast interior.

The first commercial flight, a domestic flight from Shandong province, landed at the new terminal at 8:37 Friday morning. Hundreds of Chinese staff, wearing red sashes as though they were beauty queens, roamed the vast building to help confused visitors.

The $3.75-billion terminal, one of the most prestigious projects of the Olympic construction boom in Beijing, was built by 50,000 workers who toiled on shifts around the clock. It took only four years to finish the terminal, compared with 20 years for the fifth terminal at Heathrow.

Beijing, of course, benefited from the police-state powers of the Chinese government, which demolished 10 villages to make room for the new terminal.

The statistics of the new terminal are stunning. The building has 64 restaurants, 84 retail shops, 175 escalators, 173 elevators, 437 moving sidewalks, nearly 300 check-in counters, and a state-of-the-art baggage-handling system that can move 20,000 pieces of luggage at speeds of up to 10 metres a second on 50 kilometres of conveyor belts. The construction required 1.8 million cubic metres of concrete and 500,000 tonnes of steel.

[China] is planning to have 239 airports by 2020, with 13 of them expected to handle 30 million passengers a year."