You may have seen the pretty pictures. The man whose title is so long that you know he’s important — His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai — has approved plans for phase 2 of Dubai’s Al Maktoum airport, also know as Dubai World Central (DWC), and it is a stunner.
You can understand while media outlets everywhere have picked up on drawings like this:
via Dubai Aviation Engineering Projects
For a mere AED 128 billion (~US$35 billion, give or take a billion), DWC will expand into a footprint the size of DFW’s vast landholdings. But unlike DFW which does about 90 million passengers a year from its 171 gates and Atlanta which is slightly north of 100 million people, DWC will have capacity for… 260 million passengers annually using 400 gates and five runways. This is hard to even comprehend, though note it will only have capacity for 150 million passengers when the first part opens in 10 years and Emirates moves over from DXB entirely.
Now, I know we all love pretty pictures like that one above, but I think we can also agree that they aren’t really my thing. Instead, as you all know, I prefer terribly-photoshopped images with an added bonus if it involves maps. So let’s go.
To start, I want to zoom in on the DWC facility itself. To be fair, I haven’t seen drawings that perfectly show exactly where and how this is situated, but using a few of the images that are out there, I was able to construct what I think is happening here.
In green you see the airport’s one lonely, 14,800 foot-long runway and the little baby terminal at the bottom. (I think there’s another runway to the southeast that’s maybe used for training? Anyway, it’s not a part of this vision.) But just knowing that these runways are 3 miles long helps to understand the scale of this project.
The current DWC is a joke from a passenger perspective. There are a handful of flights, primarily to Russia and Eastern Europe, that operate from the airport today. But outside of special events, there is nothing from Emirates or flyDubai, the two airlines that really matter. DWC really exists for its cargo capabilities today, and that will continue to be a hugely important focus in the future where there will be vast cargo facilities. But make no mistake… phase 2 is about passengers and replacing DXB.
The project will expand into the vast open desert that sits north of the existing site. There appears to be very little there today with the exception of the Expo 2020 site in the northwest corner that looks to remain outside of the airport’s development.
It’s precisely DWC’s location in the middle of nowhere that makes this so much easier to build. Sure, it’s about $35 billion but just imagine what this would cost if they had to acquire property and prepare the site in a dense urban location?
Dubai’s current airport, DXB, is very close to the city, just on the northeast side. It’s a quick 15 minute drive, if that. But DXB is surrounded by development and can’t grow to this epic level being planned for DWC.
The downside to DWC is, of course, that it’s where the sandworms live. Make sure to shuffle your feet when you fly out of there.
But seriously, it is close to the palm island developments that you can see jutting out into the ocean, and without question there will be some sort of high-speed rail to deliver people right into the airport by the time it’s built. I don’t imagine distance is going to be a real concern.
But growth is heading south toward DWC anyway. This is right next to a massive development called Dubai South which will have housing for up to a million people. This is one of those crazy built-from-nothing cities designed to make living/working/playing all easy and delightful. There will be housing, warehousing, workplaces, retail, and since it’s on the south side, I assume a new ballpark for the White Sox.
But this location isn’t even just about Dubai. Let’s zoom out again.
It won’t be all that far from Sharjah, the next emirate north from Dubai. Sharjah has its own airport that is growing to a capacity of 20 million people a year, but it’s never going to match Dubai. People will undoubtedly follow Emirates wherever it flies.
More importantly is Abu Dhabi in the south. The country’s capital city has its own gleaming airport and hometown airline in Etihad. But there’s no reason to think that DWC can’t easily attract people from Abu Dhabi, potentially replacing the Abu Dhabi airport at some point.
That’s really been the dream of many for a long time anyway, but this new plan will create an airport with effectively unlimited growth capability.
Is it insane? By US standards it sure is. But on the Arabian Peninsula in a world where every place is trying to outdo the next with something more incredible than the last, this fits like a glove.
