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Dubai plans to move its busy international airport to a $35 billion new facility within 10 years

https://apnews.com/article/dubai-international-airport-al-maktoum-air-travel-048de9e336d947846911fffe1685ab8f

Dubai International Airport, the world’s busiest for international travel, will move its operations to the city-state’s second, sprawling airfield in its southern desert reaches “within the next 10 years” in a project worth nearly $35 billion.

Dubai plans to move its busy international airport to a $35 billion new facility within 10 years

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s announcement marks the latest chapter in the rebound of its long-haul carrier Emirates after the coronavirus pandemic grounded international travel. Plans have been on the books for years to move the operations of the airport known as DXB to Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central which had also been delayed by the repercussions of the sheikhdom’s 2009 economic crisis.

16 comments

BestBouclettes

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Exactly what we need in the current climate crisis, more planes!

LEDZeppelin

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Climate crisis

-Dubai

Pick one

Heni_meat_smasher_69

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Can I pick 8 women and some oil money please?

ours

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I'm gonna sketch them a proposal for seaplane jet liners.

Please give me billions. Look, this CGI render prooves I've figured it all out.

SouthFresh

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How many of these grand projects have been canceled?

FlyingSquid

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Is five runways necessary? My searching around shows that airports like Heathrow and La Guardia don't have that many runways.

ahto

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I don't know about La Guardia but Heathrow is definitely at its capacity limit due to only having two runways.

maynarkh

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Their current one has 2, so if they have the space and money, and needed the 2 parallel runways so far, it makes total sense.

Multiple runways in an airport are only partly for volume reasons. Usually only the runways pointing the same way are in use at any given time, they use the ones that give you the best headwind and / or the least crosswind to land for safety.

One airport near me is near a village of a few hundred, is not even paved, but has and uses 3 runways. They are in a triangle shape, so people can pick the best one to use at any given time.

The point is the primary reason for having more than one runway is how much the wind varies in one location, and how strong it usually is, and capacity to land multiple planes is secondary.

That does not mean that they don't use intersecting runways if it is easier though, I've just checked La Guardia on LiveATC, they are using 04 for departures and 13 for arrivals right now. If you are interested, you can listen to the airport information service that pilots use on there.

VeganCheesecake

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I mean, they have the space, and I don't think a few more runways are going to make much of a dent in Dubai's climate balance sheet.

FlyingSquid

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It wasn't about that, I was just under the impression that it wasn't worth doing, but apparently it is and I just looked up the wrong airports.

VeganCheesecake

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Guess that makes sense, but I think the ones you cited are mostly like that because they where planned before international airplane travel started to really pick up. Might be wrong though.

w2tpmf

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ATL has 5. DEN has 6. DFW has 7. O'Hare has 8.

LaGuardia has 2, but they have a whole second international airport only 10 miles away. JFK has 4.

FlyingSquid

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I guess I just happened to look up the ones that had fewer. Oops. Thanks.

EinfachUnersetzlich

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Heathrow also has another five international commercial airports in the city region (all of which only have one runway, but one of those was until recently the busiest single-runway airport in the world).

Gatwick, City, Luton, Stansted and Southend, although the last of those is arguable. It calls itself London Southend so I'm keeping it.

MelastSB

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Will they build it higher than the current one? Or invest in storm drains?

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s announcement marks the latest chapter in the rebound of its long-haul carrier Emirates after the coronavirus pandemic grounded international travel.

The announcement included computer-rendered images of curving, white terminal reminiscent of the traditional Bedouin tents of the Arabian Peninsula.

Earlier in February, Dubai announced its best-ever tourism numbers, saying it hosted 17.15 million international overnight visitors in 2023.

But as those passenger numbers skyrocketed, it again put new pressure on the capacity of DXB, which remains constrained on all sides by residential neighborhoods and two major highways.

It served as a parking lot for Emirates’ double-decker Airbus A380s and other aircraft during the pandemic and slowly has come back to life with cargo and private flights in the time since.

Dubai’s 2009 financial crisis, brought on by the Great Recession, forced Abu Dhabi to provide the city-state with a $20 billion bailout.

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