DUBAI, 23 November 2005 — Dubai will have the world’s largest airport when the under-development Jebel Ali International Airport (JXB) will be built at a cost of more than $8 billion on a 140-square-kilometer plot that will house a commercial and residential city.
Jebel Ali has its own seaport and is declared a free zone, where hundreds of foreign companies are operating in various sectors, including industry, cargo and clearing, re-exports and numerous services and goods. The proposed airport could handle 120 million passengers a year, compared with today’s largest, London’s Heathrow, which has a capacity to handle 83.5 million passengers a year.
The 30-billion-dirham ($8.219 billion) JXB will be the combined size of Heathrow and Chicago’s O’Hare. It will be 10 times bigger than Dubai International Airport, according to the Department of Civil Aviation of the government of Dubai, which on Monday launched Jebel Ali Airport City (JAAC).
Dubai Civil Aviation Director for Engineering and Projects Khalifa Al-Zaffin said the project is designed to serve Dubai’s passenger and cargo air transportation needs until 2050 and beyond. It will have at least six parallel runways and as many concourses capable of handling more than 120 million passengers and more than 12 million tons of cargo per year.
The project will be completed in phases, and the first aircraft will land in the first quarter of 2007 on completion of phase one.
The project will be financed through internal resources and consortium banking.
“The project’s design is being finalized and the tendering process has started for a project which has been conceived to ensure that Dubai will not be hampered by capacity constraints. It will accommodate every aircraft type yet conceived,” he said.
JAAC is conceived as a mixed-use urban environment, comprising aviation, logistics, commercial, residential, educational, recreational, technology and entertainment components.
At the core of JAAC, and scheduled to be the project’s first component to launch operations at the end of 2007, is Dubai Logistics City (DLC), a free zone for businesses which require, or provide, logistics and multi-modal transport services to the GCC, wider Middle East, India, Africa, East Europe and the CIS.
Grading work for the first 4.5-kilometer runway is already advanced and, when complete, it will cater for a significant portion of air cargo transported through Dubai.
The 25 square kilometer development will also feature office buildings, and will provide land plots for dedicated industrial businesses, trading companies, distributors, logistics service providers and forwarders, shared facilities, such as warehouses and modern air-side cargo handling, facilities.
DLC is aimed at boosting business opportunities and developing services and facilities for its customer base that address the needs of leading global, regional and local industrial businesses, trading companies and logistics service providers who need multi-modal transportation.
