Palm Central

Infrastructure 2 min read

The airport next door will award Dh55 billion of contracts before the year ends

A wide terracotta paper band on a warm sand ground with four burnt-orange fingers extending from it, a small cream marker at the widest point

The nearest thing to a guarantee that a district will exist in ten years is a construction site next to it that cannot be cancelled without embarrassment.

The size of the airport award

Dubai Airports expects to award Dh55 billion (about $14.9 billion) of contracts for the Al Maktoum International Airport expansion by the end of 2026, on top of Dh13 billion already awarded this year.

What is already in the ground

Chief executive Paul Griffiths put the work to date at 10 million work hours over 15 months, with 17,000 piles installed and 45 million cubic metres of earth moved. There are 9,000 workers on site now; peak labour demand is put at around 120,000.

The scale it is being built to

The first phase opens in 2032 with capacity for 150 million passengers a year. Ultimate capacity is more than 260 million passengers and 12 million tonnes of cargo. Dubai International is described as nearing maximum capacity, which is the reason the second airport has to work.

The route map argument

Griffiths made a specific point about aircraft rather than terminals: long-range narrow-bodies such as the Airbus A321XLR could triple the number of cities the airport can serve directly, taking the reachable network to roughly 600 destinations. He also said construction was continuing «unhindered by regional conflict».

For the southern Dubai corridor the airport is the single largest input into every other assumption, and it is worth being precise about how it arrives. A 2032 opening means the first material change to daily life is not flights but employment: 120,000 workers at peak is a housing, transport and retail demand that lands years before the first passenger, and it lands closest to the communities nearest the site. That is the effect to plan for in the late 2020s, and it is a different effect from the one people usually price in, which is proximity to a working international terminal. The second thing to hold lightly is the contract number. Dh55 billion of awards by December is a statement of intent by a state-owned client, and the useful confirmation is not the announcement but the award notices themselves, because a slipped tender is the earliest visible sign of a slipped programme. The third is connectivity: an airport at the far end of the emirate is only close to a district if the road and rail to it exist, and the transport links serving DWC are on their own timetables, none of which is 2032.

Source: The National checked against the source

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