Military land approved for new Tan Son Nhat airport terminal

According to a resolution signed Thursday by Deputy Prime Minister Le Van Thanh, the ministry will hand over 16.05 hectares of land in Tan Binh District to facilitate construction of the third terminal (T3) at the Tan Son Nhat International Airport, and 11.8 hectares to build a road connecting with the terminal.

The area to build the road will be handed over only after Ho Chi Minh City transfers the fund for site clearance and compensating military units affected by the plan to upgrade the airport.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh had instructed the National Defense Ministry to expedite handover of the needed land so that the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) could start work on the third terminal in the third quarter.

He ordered that construction be "completed by September 2024 at the earliest."

The terminal will have an annual capacity of 20 million passengers, thereby easing the overload on existing terminals.

The work is expected to cost VND10.99 trillion ($470 million) and will be fully funded by the ACV, a joint-stock company owned 95.4 percent by the government.

The ACV has decided that the new terminal will be built in the shape of an ao dai, the traditional tunic worn by Vietnamese women.

Tan Son Nhat is currently the largest and busiest airport in Vietnam, with terminals 1 and 2 used for domestic and international flights, respectively.

At its busiest, the airport handles 840-850 flights and 130,000 passengers a day.

The airport has been overloaded for years, and the result is visible cracks and deformation as well as subsidence of the asphalt on its runways and taxiways.

It has been serving 36 million passengers a year since 2017 against its designed capacity of 25 million a year by 2020.