The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has unmasked ambitious designs to establish one of the largest airports in the world—the King Salman International Airport. KSA Crown Prince and prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman said the airport’s contour will be created on the site of Riyadh’s current King Khalid International Airport.
Saudi Arabia has revealed its intention to build the contemporary site over a whacking area of over 57 square kilometers (22 Square miles) with approximately six parallel runways, permitting 185 million passengers to travel annually by 2050.
As Saudi Arabia persists to thrive exceptionally as a tourist destination, it’s always making plans and coming up with whopping things for its citizens and the entire world. According to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), King Salman International Airport will be put into the current airport terminals in situ, and be powered by renewable energy.
The mega-structure will be designed by starchitects Foster + Partners, who have anointed it as an “aerotropolis”.
Foster + Partners is a global studio for architecture, urbanism, and design, rooted in sustainability, which was founded in 1967 by Norman Foster.
The new airport anticipates lugging 120 million passengers annually by 2030, before augmenting it by 50% over the subsequent two decades. Furthermore, it desires to process 3.5 million tons of cargo by 2050.
The outstanding design will include multiple glass walls that will unite passengers inside the terminal to the terrific outdoor areas promoting a wonderful travel experience for them. The airport design would showcase Saudi culture that will exhibit diverse traditions of the people living in the capital Riyadh and other cities.
Moreover, the flying junction is set to be built and funded by the Public Investment Fund, which is Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Saudi Arabia already has one of the world’s gigantic airports, King Fahd International Airport in Dammam which is 250 miles northeast of Riyadh; it still never stops thriving and growing its economy.
King Salman airport: A gateway to tourism by 2030
Luke Fox, Foster + Partners’ head of the studio, said, “The airport would reimagine the conventional and traditional terminal as a single concourse loop, administered by numerous entrances.”
The area will consist of over 4.5 square miles of retail venues, “residential and recreational facilities,” and logistics areas.
Seif A. Bahaa Eldin, a senior partner at Foster + Partners said, “The ambition is to assist Riyadh’s position as a global epicenter of creativeness and innovation.” The tremendous objective behind this incredible initiative is to stay as sustainable as possible—with the utmost use of renewable energy and a LEED Platinum certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) in the strategies.
According to Reuters, the SPA further stated that this massive development “would concoct 103,000 explicit and indirect jobs” leading to a proliferation in the employment rate in the country.
The SPA also added that the airport evolution sought to recast Riyadh as the “Top 10 city economies around the globe and to subsidize the development of Riyadh’s population to 15 to 20 million people by 2030.” Saudi Arabia is scrutinizing the airport expansion as a remarkable step to initiate an international aviation hub, utilizing “cutting edge green initiatives to function as a bridge linking the East and the West,” the SPA further articulated.
The city’s current airport called King Khaled International Airport will correspondingly serve as a base for Saudi Arabia’s new and pristine airline, RIA.
The go-between will be an adversary for Emirates and Qatar Airways and is expected to pitch at the end of 2022—after its actual 2024 blastoff date was recently brought ahead. Nevertheless, Kingdom’s plan to build the world’s largest airports will definitely kick off new beginnings and enable the country to prosper massively.
Tourism and Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has undoubtedly evolved rapidly throughout these years. From infrastructure to economy, it has certainly undergone huge development that is worth the praise.
Nowadays, it is devouring hefty sums of money to create new cities and destinations to attract millions of tourists from every corner of the world.
However, this remarkable establishment of the new airport will add to the paths to serve numerous passengers and tourists, depicting itself as a glorious base to boost the country’s economy along with the trade and tourism sector.
Saudi Arabia plans to create a humongous thrift and become one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world, and its extraordinary efforts towards the motive will surely bear fruit in no time. The airport would be built in the coming years, so stay tuned to our page for further updates.
READ MORE:
Floating city Saudi Arabia: World’s largest turtle-shaped Pangeos Terayacht
Car-free cities: Can this concept make its way to Pakistan?
