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, its ruler said Sunday.
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.
Is five runways necessary? My searching around shows that airports like Heathrow and La Guardia don’t have that many runways.
I don’t know about La Guardia but Heathrow is definitely at its capacity limit due to only having two runways.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess I just happened to look up the ones that had fewer. Oops. Thanks.
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.