Structural part of HCMC airport's new terminal completed

It covers a floor area of 112,500 square meters and has one basement and four floors above ground, and the work took 15 days more than scheduled, Le Khac Hong, the terminal's project manager, said Wednesday.

Outside, the 130,000-square-meter parking and services facility is 96% complete.

Its two basements and four floors also have a shopping center, a hotel and restaurants and cafes.

Hong said structural work on many other components are also basically complete, including the building housing the electrical equipment and wastewater treatment plant.

Work is apace on other components such as the aircraft parking bay and overpasses.

The construction employs around 2,500 workers and engineers.

"The next stage of setting up the electromechanical systems will proceed faster than the structural construction phase," Hong said.

T3 is budgeted to cost nearly VND11 trillion (US$432 million), and is funded by the state-owned Airports Corporation of Vietnam.

The contractor for the work is a consortium consisting of the Hanoi Construction Corporation, Construction Corporation No.1, the Ministry of National Defense’s 319 Corporation, the army’s Truong Son Construction, Ricons Construction Investment, and Luu Nguyen Construction.

Overpasses under construction at Terminal 3 of Tan Son Nhat airport, HCMC, June 2024. Photo by VnExpress/Gia Minh

The biggest challenge facing the work is the limited space available, which complicates logistics like crane installation and storing materials and requires the contractors to carefully map out the sequence of work.

"Many structural components have to be prefabricated at factories and then transported to the construction site for assembly rather than being made on-site," Hong said.

Besides, since the terminal construction is adjacent to an operational airport, the use of cranes, that usually range from 75 to 127 meters in height, could mean intruding into airspace, he said.

So the work has to be carefully planned to preclude risks, he said.

The work is set for completion by April 30 next year, two months ahead of schedule.

Once open, T3 will be the largest domestic passenger terminal in the country and increase the airport's annual capacity to 50 million passengers together with the existing T1 and T2.

T1 serves domestic flights and T2, international flights.

T3’s design is inspired by the traditional ao dai, a cultural symbol of Vietnam.

It will have 90 check-in counters, 20 automatic baggage drop counters, 42 self check-in kiosks, 27 boarding gates, six baggage handling islands, and 10 baggage belts.

A new four-kilometer road linking the terminal with Tran Quoc Hoan and Cong Hoa streets is under construction at a cost of more than VND4.8 trillion.

It is expected to be completed by the end of this year, and provide an alternative route to Truong Son Road.

 

 

Structural part of HCMC airport's new terminal completed

This is how Tan Son Nhat's new terminal will look like