DLC Dalian New Airport Master Plan

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Building a new airport from land reclamation has been a commonplace occurrence in the past few decades in the world. Famous precedents include Japan’s Kansai KIX and Nagoya NGO, Hong Kong HKG, South Korea’s ICN, and the Airport of Nice in France NCE. For the city of Dalian, the best location for a new airport was determined to also be through this age-old way of land creation. SAAN, along with UK’s engineering firm Mott MacDonald, was asked by the Dalian airport authority to provide a project study and present this vision to the People’s Congress Assembly of the City. This proposal was subsequently approved, with a few political hiccups, and the DLC airport is now almost completed.

It is being built on 21 square kilometers of reclaimed land in Jinzhou Bay off the coast of Dalian and is set to become the world’s largest offshore airport. It will become China’s first airport built on an artificial island. The airport is designed to handle the A380 aircraft, the largest passenger jet, and is projected to cost 26.3 billion yuan (US$4.3 billion) to build. While the airport was originally planned to open in 2018, as of 2020, construction appeared to have been stalled in the land reclamation phase since 2016.

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