It has been a little while since I last updated this page but I have been very busy trying to work for all of you and hopefully all my hard work will pay off soon!
Beijing's Capital airport is the busiest airport in China and in 2004 overtook Tokyo's Haneda Airport as the busiest airport in Asia in terms of airplane movements. It is also supposed to have an average of 1500-1600 airplane movements per day by the time the Olympics roll around in August.
In case you were wondering, the above picture is not (as much as it may look like) a) from Star Wars nor is it b) the newest Hard Rock Cafe but rather it is Beijing's recently opened Terminal 3. The largest airport terminal in the world.
Some of the amazing features of this new terminal are its size and the state of the art technology it uses to sort luggage and cargo. Below is a short description of the new luggage transfer system that is employed at terminal 3.
"One of Terminal 3's highlights is the US$240 million luggage-transfer system. The luggage system is equipped with yellow carts, each of which has a code, matching the bar code on every piece of luggage loaded on it, allowing easy and accurate tracking. More than 200 cameras will be used to monitor activities in the luggage area.
The luggage system can handle 19,200 pieces of luggage per hour. After luggage is checked in at any one of the 292 counters at Terminal 3A, they can be transferred at the speed of ten meters per second. Even for international routes, luggage can travel from T3A to T3B in five minutes. Arriving passengers should be able to begin retrieving their luggage within 4.5 minutes after airplanes are unloaded.
Along with X-ray scanners, additional equipment conducts checks such as for explosives. Passengers will be able to check in their luggage at the airport several hours or even a day before their flight. The airport will store them in its luggage system and then load them on the correct airplane."
The size of the new terminal has been compared to being the surface area of over 170 soccer fields, it cost over $2.8 Billion to construct and was built in less than 4 years (from inception, under 3 years for construction) which is an unbelievable pace for this type of structure.
If you would like to see more of the new terminal at Beijing's Capital airport click on the multimedia tab and there is a short video giving you a better look at the facilities.
Oh yeah, and if you thought that this project was a lot to handle and were thinking that maybe they were just building this structure for the Olympics you were wrong. This project has been called a "stop-gap" by Chinese officials and plans for another airport are already under way to be build 40-km south of Beijing's city center, plans are for this airport to begin in 2010.
