In 2015 Dubai International Airport overtook Heathrow to become the busiest airport in the world. At the time, DXB was handling 75 million passengers per year. At the start of 2016 improvements to Concourse D mean that the airport is capable of handling an astounding 90 million passengers a year. Dubai International Airport is the smaller of Dubai’s two airports.
Dubai World Central (DWC) started cargo operations in 2010 and handled its first passenger flight in 2013. When completed, DWC will have the capacity to handle 160 million passengers a year. Combining DXB and DWC, Dubai (just Dubai, not the entire UAE) will have airport capacity of more than 250 million passengers a year. To put that figure into context, 250 million passengers is equal to the entire population of the UK visiting the Emirate 4 times (with the luckier ones visiting 5).
Let’s put aside the astounding numbers for a moment and consider why Dubai has opted for such capacity. The UAE is geographically placed in the centre of the world. It takes approximately 8 hours to fly from Western Europe to the UAE, and about 8 hours to fly from The Philipines to the UAE. North & South America and Australasia take a little longer to get to, but outside of those areas almost every other country in the world is reachable. This makes the UAE an ideal mid-point for trade between Europe and Asia, and the logical choice for passenger flight transfers.
But the opportunity is not limited to companies working directly with airports or air services. DWC is at the heart of the larger Dubai South development (formally Dubai World Central), a project that will eventually cover a 145 square kilometre area of land. Hong Kong Island is half that size.
It’s difficult to put the opportunity that Dubai South offers into a written blog. Dubai is constructing a city approximately the size of Liverpool and Oxford combined. For information on Dubai South you can visit the official website, which states 500, 000 jobs will be created. To learn more about Dubai’s airports click here.