Chengdu’s new Airport has opened for passengers.

China’s Xhengdu Tianfu Airport opened up for it’s first commercial flight on Sunday June 27th. The new Airport is located about 50km south-east of Chengdu’s city center, and will serve travelers to the Sichuan province in addition the already existing Shuangilu airport, making Chengdu the 3rd city in China to have two international airport, in addition to Beijing and Shanghai.

The new airport has 3 runways, 2 parallel and one crossing runway. There are two large midfield terminals, which has a capacity of serving up to 60 million passengers each year. The airport will serve both domestic and international passengers, although for now it is only open for domestic travel due to Covid-restrictions on international travel.

For now the new airport covers an area of about 700.000 square meters, but when it is completed it will be twice as large, with an annual capacity of 120 million passengers. If they are planning on building more runways is unclear, but I would assume so. The parallel runways are named 01/19 and 02/20, so to me this indicates that they are planning on another 2 parallel runways to be built eventually. The crossing runway (11/29) is not open for use yet as far as I know.

A semi-high speed metro connects the new airport to Chengdu, and the traveling time is about 37 minutes. By 2023 there will also be a metro line connecting the two airports with about the same traveling time.

China has today around 240 airports, and they are planning on having a total of around 400 by 2035, so there is a massive amount of airports being build around the country, and many of them seem to be the same size as this one, which looks promising for the slow recovery of aviation after Covid – at least China seems to be planning for the further development of tourism and travelling, and I am looking forward to visiting many new places around the country when it opens up for tourism again – and Chengdu is pretty close to the top of my list of places where I want to spend a few days exploring!