The Monday Metropolis: Public Beta: Beijing Airport Terminal 3

I remember those days of the 1980s. Were it not for its size — tiny at just a single terminal and about 14 docks — visitors to the capital of the PRC would still be served by what used to be a white-and-green Terminal 1, which used to handle all flights, domestic and international. The terminal is still there, but has been redone so that it now looks grey, and is used only by two airlines running domestic-only services.

Then, 1999 came — this time, the airport grew by leaps and bounds (OK, by quite a bit). A new Terminal 2 came in with more gates than Terminal 1 could possibly think of, and the architecture inside the new terminal was so good, it looked like CDG. All they were missing is that Indicatif Roissy, which used to be the SMS alert for your aeronautically cheerful blogger’s mobile phone.

On a late Beijingology photo shooting spree, I headed today for Shunyi and Huairou. On the trip back, I used a side highway next to what’s pretty much now Terminal 3. The first thing that caught my eyes was a signpost for the “2nd Airport Freeway” (they could have easily renamed this one the “Airport East Freeway”). That was it. I noticed that cars were turning right into this new aerial megalopolis in the making.

The temptation was too much. I turned right, drove ahead, and saw this:

  Ladies and gents, I kid you not: the airport at first looked like a mix between SFO and the bridges connecting the roundabout road with Terminal 1 at Beijing Airport. Until now, my glimpses of the airport’s newest terminal were strictly bird’s-eye-view-only.This was too different. Dedicated taxi lanes, bilingual signage, onramps to the freeway… I had a feeling that the guy that slipped in that automatic keyboard backlighting feature on the PowerBook G4 did this. To Swiss eyes, this looked pretty much it.

The other thing that got me interested was the vast array of roads in the new terminal. It looked like some kind of new town sprung up right next to the new building. Contrast that with the terminal-only Terminals 1 and 2 (pardon the pun) — it’s either straight up, straight down, or back to the freeway. This one gave me a feeling that it connected to a nearby towns or something.

And connect to a nearby towns it, in fact, did — not far from Terminal 3 were Gangshan and Tianzhu towns. Oh sure, traffic in these towns were ghastly, but they were never built as places to let the bulk of traffic through!

That’s just the outside. In two weeks, it’s the inside — but in a very different way… By the way, Terminal 3 opens on February 29, 2008. Six airlines, including British Airways, will move in; Air China is to follow in March 2008.