The star of NDIA

Anyone familiar with cartoons and a certain kind of movie might associate the word mirage with an optical illusion encountered in desert conditions – a powerful image of something that isn’t actually there.

The more scientifically inclined will know that the mirage is a real optical phenomenon, which can produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. A real world mirage is not an imaginary object, but an image of something that is much further away than it appears.

Many believe that the New Doha International Airport (NDIA) may be just such a mirage – undeniably real but rather further away than it at first appears.

The existing Doha airport has become increasingly incapable of meeting the needs of the booming economy of Qatar, which has seen a rapid growth in aircraft movements and passenger numbers (largely driven by the rapid expansion of Qatar’s state airline Qatar Airways), and which has resulted in major pressures on existing airport infrastructure. A new, state-of-the-art, airport was clearly needed.

Plans for a new airport began in 2003, and a 22 square kilometre site, said to be one third of the size of the city of Doha itself, was chosen east of the existing airport on the seaward side. Almost half of the new site was to be built on reclaimed land, requiring more than 62 million cubic metres of ‘fill’. With an area of 2,200 hectares, the New Doha International Airport will be almost twice the size of London’s Heathrow Airport. 

The contract for the first phase of the airport construction and for the planning and design phase was awarded to the Bechtel Group in early 2004.

The NDIA is designed to be able to deal with growing passenger numbers and aircraft movements, and will be able to handle 24 million passengers (three times as many as the current airport) as soon as it opens, with an eventual planned capacity of 50 million or, according to some sources, as many as 93 million.

The airport will be able to accommodate 320,000 annual movements, and two million tonnes of cargo annually. Its two parallel runways will be 15,910ft long (4,850m) and 13,940ft (4,250m) long, respectively – the second, shorter runway opening as part of Phase III, along with an expansion of terminal facilities and an increase in the number of gates.

NDIA is said to be the world’s first airport to be designed and built specifically for unconstrained operations by the double-decker Airbus A380 – the world’s largest passenger aircraft and planned to be a mainstay of the Qatar Airways fleet. The needs of Qatar Airways lie at the heart of the NDIA project, and the airport will be the carrier’s home base and hub. As such, the New Doha airport will include a new headquarters building for the airline and training facilities for Qatar Airways, including flight simulators.

When it opens, the NDIA will have a three-storey, 219,000 square metre terminal with 40 gates, four of which will be able to cater specifically for the A380. This terminal will have a capacity of 24 million passengers a year and will include a suspended monorail ‘people mover’ that will transport passengers through the terminal.

Qatar Airways is proud to call itself the world’s fastest-growing premium airline, and premium facilities will very much be in evidence at NDIA, providing high levels of service, comfort and convenience.

The terminal will incorporate up to 25,000 square metres of retail space and comfortable lounges and there will be a 100-room hotel within the terminal for the convenience of visitors and transfer passengers, with a larger airport hotel adjacent to the terminal.

The new airport will include an aircraft maintenance centre with hangars large enough to simultaneously accommodate two A380s and three A340s, as well as a cargo facility with a capacity of 750,000 tonnes a year, and with eight of its own dedicated aircraft hard-standing parking bays.

A new Emiri Terminal complex for VIP flights is being provided at NDIA, with additional hard-stands and with separate road access, while a pipeline project to transport JET-A1 fuel from the petroleum refinery in Mesaieed to the airport is virtually complete.

Forty further contact gates will be added beyond 2015, taking the total to 80 – six of them dedicated to the A380. The terminal building itself will be expanded to 416,000 square metres, handling 50 million passengers a year.

Construction work commenced in 2004 with the initial aim of opening in 2009, though this ambitious deadline has already slipped. The opening of NDIA is now expected to be ‘phased’, with a ‘light opening’, perhaps for cargo only, in late 2011. Local industry insiders and operators seem sceptical about the publicly-announced timetables relating to the opening of NDIA, and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what will happen to the rotary-wing, business aviation, and military operations now being undertaken from Doha.

Some expect the existing Doha runway to be retained for some of these uses, while others expect to ‘migrate’ to any new airfield that may be created as part of the new ‘Aerospace City’ concept.

In the meantime, efforts have been made to improve capacity at the existing airport. A separate new arrivals terminal has been built, and the old terminal has been transformed into a new departure building. Qatar Airways is also adding another 12 gates at Doha, further improving capacity.