Japan inaugurates ultra-modern International Kansai airport
Japan inaugurates ultra-modern International Kansai airport
TOKYO (AFP): It has been an engineer's nightmare and a magnet for terrorist wrath, but today, Japan inaugurates its International Kansai airport, a mammoth project on the sea near Osaka designed to become the main gateway to Asia.
The airport, which took eight years to complete, will be the most expensive in the world to use. It has been built on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, five kilometers from Japan's third-largest city.
The task of throwing 150 million cubic meters of earth into the 18-meter-deep ocean and then stabilizing the reclaimed land while work was continuing on the surface proved to be an engineer's nightmare.
The problems delayed the opening of the airport by 18 months, and increased the cost by 50 percent. As well, Japanese leftists have protested against the new airport. There have already been 20 terrorist attacks on the airport site.
The final cost of the new international airport is in the region of 1,500 billion yen (US$15 billion), three times the cost of Tokyo's Narita airport finished in 1978.
The airport is linked to Osaka by a four-kilometer bridge and a fast ferry service, and is in the heart of Kansai, Japan's second-biggest economic region, with a gross national product equal to that of Canada.
The airport is also designed to handle millions of travelers from the Tokyo area, to ease the congestion at Narita.
Due to the heavy traffic it can take four hours to get from the center of Tokyo to Narita.
When it opens next month, the new airport will run 24 hours a day.
An air shuttle service will take passengers to the domestic Haneda airport, thirty minutes from central Tokyo.
Kansai airport will be able to handle more than 30 million passengers and 1.4 million tons of freight per year, with up to 454 flights in and out possible each day.
Critics
Situated close to the Siberian air corridor along which travelers from Europe travel, and en route for trans-Pacific travelers, Osaka could become an air hub for Asia.
However even before it has opened, the airport has had its critics. Landing fees have been labeled exorbitant by airlines, while others consider the new airport too little too late given the phenomenal increase in worldwide air traffic.
The new airport, like Narita, has a single runway. According to some studies it could be saturated within ten years if, as some predict, 50 percent of all air travel next century is concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region.
A second and third runway could be built on the enlarged island.
Landing taxes are nearly four times as high as those in Hong Kong, Singapore and Auckland. A total of 317 weekly flights by 26 airlines from 20 countries have been confirmed for the airport's opening. This is just half the original target for weekly flights upon inauguration.
Japan's new airport will also face tough regional competition from other newcomers. Before the end of the decade, new airports will be opened in Hong Kong, Seoul, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.