BarcelonaThe return of the project to build a new maritime runway at El Prat airport has resurfaced the examples of other mega-constructions that (with different designs and technologies) managed to gain land on the coast to bring more passengers to their destinations. Many of these experiences can be found in Asia and the Gulf countries, where some states continue to project multimillion-dollar investments to build what they believe will be the major infrastructures of the future of the aeronautical industry.
Kansai Airport (Japan)
The initiative of the group of Catalan experts has inevitably recalled, and saving the distances, the construction of the Kansai airport in the Japanese city of Osaka. Unlike the proposal to place the new El Prat track on pylons located 1.5 kilometers from the coast, the Japanese infrastructure was built on an artificial island 4.4 kilometers long by 2.5 kilometers wide in the middle of Osaka Bay. Opened in 1994 and designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, the airport was designed to withstand the potential earthquakes and typhoons of the region.
To build it, the earth was excavated from three mountains and eighty ships were used to transport the materials. The bridge connecting the island to the mainland alone cost $1 billion. The total cost of the project skyrocketed to $20 billion, and over time problems began to appear. For example, the creators had predicted that the structure of the artificial island would sink at most 5.7 meters, which ended up being 8. In 2018 the airport also had to stop all operations after of suffering floods with the arrival of Typhoon Jebi in Japan.
Hamad Airport (Qatar)
Hamad International Airport is the main point of connections to the rest of the world for Qatar’s flag carrier, the luxurious Qatar Airways. This infrastructure (which replaced the old Doha airport) began to be built in 2005 and was inaugurated in 2014, with an initial capacity of around 30 million passengers per year, which its managers already want to increase to 50 millions of travelers. Its facilities occupy nearly 22 square kilometers, more than half of which are land reclaimed from the sea built in the form of an artificial peninsula. On the other hand, the airport has a runway of 4,850 meters, one of the longest in the world.
Finally, and after several delays in the start date of operations, this pharaonic project had a cost of about 15.5 billion dollars. The development of Hamad airport was also part of Qatar’s multibillion-dollar investments in the run-up to the World Cup, which took place in the Gulf emirate last year.
Hong Kong Airport
Hong Kong changed an airport located very close to residential areas for one built on an artificial island. The new airfield at Chek Lap Kok was opened in 1998 after flattening and leveling two islands of about 3 square kilometers and gaining about 9 square kilometers of land in the sea. The office of the British architect Norman Foster was in charge of its design. To connect the infrastructure with the other islands of Hong Kong, the Tsing Ma Suspension Bridge was built, with a length of 2.2 kilometers. The whole of the works had a cost of more than 20,000 million dollars and increased the area of the city by 1%.
In 2019, before the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, a total of 71.5 million travelers passed through its facilities, but these figures dropped dramatically with restrictions on the movement of people and in 2022 annual traffic stood at 5.7 million passengers. Even so, Hong Kong’s is also part of the list of airports that are looking to grow more and expand their facilities in the coming years. Its master plan for 2030 includes the construction of a third runway to increase capacity.
Haneda Airport (Japan)
In 2010, Haneda Airport, located about 20 kilometers from the center of Tokyo, completed the construction of a fourth runway of 2,500 meters located above the sea. In this case, this new platform located in the bay also has a structure of pylons, like the one proposed by the promoters of the Prat maritime runway (it must be taken into account, however, that these take the design of the wind turbines of the North Sea ), with the aim that the river that flows into it continues to flow normally. It is a structure of around 500,000 square meters that is supported by 1,165 of these steel pylons.
As some of its leaders explained in a specialized academic publication, the project involved the use of an enormous amount of materials, including 470,000 tons of steel and 450,000 cubic meters of concrete. The aim of this expansion of Tokyo International Airport was to increase its operational capacity from 285,000 annual movements to 407,000 movements, so that new frequencies could be added to existing routes and destinations added.