DUBAI, 13 July 2004 — A second airport is to be built in Dubai and will be operational at the end of 2006, civil aviation chief Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al-Maktoum said.
The new airport will be located near the free zone of Jebel Ali, 50 kilometers out of town, and will initially handle only freight before opening up to chartered flights, Al-Khaleej daily quoted him as saying in a report yesterday.
To be built at a cost of up to one billion dirhams (about $272 million), the new airport should become operational at the end of 2006, with a capacity to initially handle 250,000 to 300,000 tons of freight per year, said Sheikh Ahmed, who is also chairman of Dubai’s Emirates airline.
Dubai International Airport, which is being expanded at a cost of around $4 billion, handled 10.41 million passengers in the first half of this year, an increase of 27 percent on the same period in 2003. Volume of freight in the same period soared by 21.7 percent to 535,212 tons.
Dubai, a tourist and commercial hub, expects to handle annual traffic of about 30 million passengers by 2010 and more than 60 million by 2020.
