The opening of Hamad International airport has been delayed again. But it still looks impressive
By C.S.
THE wait for the opening of Qatar's new airport goes on. Hamad International was due to receive its first flight on April 1st, but the process was delayed (for a fourth time) for reasons Gulf News attributes to the airport's failure to meet safety and security standards. The facility, which is opening in stages, will eventually replace the old, overcrowded Doha airport 4km (2.5 miles) to the west.
Passenger numbers throughout the Gulf have been soaring for more than a decade, and Hamad has been built in anticipation of further growth. When finished, its passenger facilities will be 12 times larger than those at the old airport. Qatar’s aviation authority expects the airport to handle up to 55m passengers a year and says it can deal with the simultaneous arrivals of six superjumbos. Hamad is two-thirds the size of metropolitan Doha itself, and will have its own monorail network. Next door, developers are creating Airport City, a new residential district that will house 200,000 workers.
Everything about the project is enormous. Sceptics scoff that, at a cost of $15.5 billion, Hamad will quickly become a white elephant in the tradition of oversized airports elsewhere. But the new airport should satisfy demand that already exists. The old airport, built long before state-backed Qatar Airways became a global giant, was designed to handle 12m passengers a year. It currently gets about 20m. Hamad will not only ease this pressure, but also bolster Qatar’s ambition to become a genuine world aviation hub.
To make this ambition a reality, airport authorities have striven to create an attractive place for long-haul passengers to make a stopover. There will be more than 40,000 square metres of retail space, with anchor tenants rumoured to include the Harrods department store. Hotels, kindergartens, health spas, a mosque and a bowling alley will appear later, together with a stand-alone royal terminal. The site, designed and built by Bechtel, an American building company, has a desert theme, and Terminal 1B, which Gulliver visited, is studded with palm trees and miniature oases.
Only 10 airlines, none of which requires access to the not-quite-finished business lounges, are due to use the airport from the moment it opens. Among them are flydubai, Air Arabia, and Air India Express. Qatar Airways will not move in until the lounges are ready, but its chief executive says the airline will be fully operational at Hamad by the end of the year.
The new airport was originally meant to have opened in 2009, but won’t fully replace the old airport until 2015. Even so, nobody on site during Gulliver’s visit seemed pessimistic. Check-in and security trials involving 3,500 people went successfully. Local aviation bosses expect Hamad to outdo arch-rival Dubai and set new standards for airports worldwide. Thanks mostly to Qatar Airways’ aggressive expansion, the new airport will eventually connect to at least 45 more destinations than the old one. And thus the centre of world aviation shifts ever closer towards this small, cash-rich peninsula in the Gulf.
