Beijing's new airport to become world's largest

Beijing's new airport, planned for the city's Daxing District, will be completed by 2040, reported by the Beijing times on Thursday.

The new airport was designed by Iraq-born British architect Zaha Hadid, who used a streamlined design to provide the new airport with vitality.

"The new airport will experience two phases of construction and will have an annual throughput capacity of 100 million passengers by 2040, becoming the world's largest airport," said Wang Baoling, Deputy Director of Beijing SIA City Holdings Co. Ltd., at the China Design Festival in Beijing.

Wang also said the airport will be officially put into operation in 2019 with 4 runways, capable of handling 45 million passengers annually. Meanwhile, follow-up constructions will continue, and the airport is set to expand its annual capacity to handle 72 million passengers and 2 million tons of freights by 2025. By 2040, another two new runways will be completed, which will promote the airport's capacity to deal with an annual passenger flow of 100 million and freight capacity of 4 million tons.

Currently, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the world's busiest airport with a total of 95 million passengers in 2014 followed by Beijing with 83.7 million. If passenger capacity at Atlanta airport remains unchanged, Beijing's new airport will become the world's largest by 2040.

The new airport in Beijing is designed to resemble a phoenix, which echoes the dragon shape of Beijing Capital International Airport.

Moreover, the phoenix shape will also bring great convenience to passengers as baggage arrival time will only take 13 minutes, and passengers will need only 8 minutes to walk from the Customs to the boarding gates.

The Guardian has ranked the new structure at the top in a report called "Megastructures: Seven Wonders of the Modern World Near Completion."