The sky might not be the limit for air travel, but the runways

The announcements are becoming more and more familiar. Most recently it was American Airlines last week launching daily Dallas-to-Beijing service, giving Dallas/Fort Worth airport, in the space of one year, what the CAPA Centre for Aviation in Sydney calls "the trifecta of Greater China destinations": Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

That makes Dallas the 10th airport in North America to link directly with the three cities. Los Angeles, New York JFK, San Francisco and Vancouver service those cities and more, with San Francisco servicing six, the most of all airports on the continent.

A month earlier, China Eastern launched Nanjing-Los Angeles service and said it applied for a thrice-weekly Chengdu-Nanjing-Los Angeles route (with return); Hainan said it will kick off a Beijing-San Jose route and beef up its Beijing-Boston and Beijing-Seattle service by also linking those cities with Shanghai; and US carrier Delta is speeding up its entry into the most competitive route - Los Angeles-Shanghai - citing the impact of the visa liberalization policies, which Delta said caught them by surprise.

"The China-US market continues to grow, as expected, but the segment is showing acceleration in the way that growth is occurring," CAPA said. In other words, fasten your seatbelts.

As reports come in that Hainan Airlines is actually running out of the Boeing 787s it has built its North American fleet with, there is a more fundamental problem looming on the horizon for this soaring growth - places to land.

An airport-building boom is well underway throughout Asia, with three of the most expensive newest ones - Hong Kong's Chek Lap Kok, Osaka-Kansai, Nagoya-Central Japan and Seoul-Incheon - built on land reclaimed from the sea. And the building has a long way to go before meeting the demand.

In 2005, China had 196 airports that could handle transport aircraft, compared to the US, roughly the same land area with a quarter the number of people, with 14,000.

Between 2006 and 2010, China spent about a quarter of its 1 trillion yuan outlay for the aviation sector on 33 new airports and improvements to existing ones. Under the 12th Five-Year Plan, which covered 2011-2015, China planned to expand as many as 91 of its existing airports, while 56 new ones were planned and 16 earmarked for relocation.

"Some 26 airports in China are facing overcapacity problems," Li Xiaojin, a professor at Civil Aviation University of China said in 2011. "Not only do they need more flights for passengers, but in many cases more runways for flights." Delays were becoming the stuff of legend.

Just three years after Beijing wowed the world with its brand new $4.5 billion Beijing Capital International Airport just in time for the 2008 Olympics, the glitzy facility - the largest in the world at the time - was already bursting at the seams trying to handle capacity. It was designed to handle 76 million passengers a year and by 2013 was coping with 83.7 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

As of January of this year, 96 airlines operated flights out of Beijing serving more than 86 million passengers on 582,000 flights.

A "mega airport" with seven runways (four more than Capital) was envisioned. To make it a major world player, it needed to have the capacity to handle 100 million passengers annually.

The project was awarded to Iraqi-British architect Dame Zaha Hadid, who also designed the London Aquatic Center for the 2012 Olympics and had made an impression in Beijing with her widely applauded Galaxy SOHO building.

The design for the yet-to-be-officially-named airport was unveiled in February and has already earned a nickname - the "golden asterisk" - because of its hub-and-six-spoke radial layout and China gold color.

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has yet to specify the precise size of the terminal, beyond saying it will be the world's largest, handling 72 million passengers and 2 million tons of cargo annually. Reports online have put the floor area at more than 7.5 million square feet (with an 860,000-sqaure-foot transportation area) at a cost of $13.1 billion and a completion date of 2018.

If that's accurate, it should take some of the pressure off of the world's previously largest airport in the world across town.

As the ZHA website comments on the project: "the building will be extremely user-focused, efficient, adaptable and sustainable for future growth to serve the world's fastest growing aviation sector."

It seems like a project that should get done without delay.

Contact the writer at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com.