The creation of a massive new aviation hub at Dubai World Central is set to revolutionise the way passengers and freight move. Dubai’s success stems from geographical advantage and lacklustre competition in Europe, writes Martin Rivers in an article in The Gulf, our sister magazine .

Thinking big has never been a problem for the rulers of Dubai. Back in 2005, when fewer than 24 million passengers used Dubai International Airport (DXB), the emirate unveiled plans for a six-runway hub at Jebel Ali, southwest of the city, that could handle up to 120 million people each year.

A sprawling complex called Dubai World Central (DWC) was to be developed around the airport, creating “the world’s first purpose-built aerotropolis”.

At the time, DXB did not even rank among the top ten busiest international gateways on the planet. Dubai’s vision of becoming the centrepiece of global aviation was ridiculed in some corners as a delusion fuelled by free-flowing cash and unbridled Gulf egos. For years to come, discussions about the project were tainted with accusations of building a “white elephant” in the desert.

Today, however, with DXB on the cusp of overtaking London Heathrow Airport as the largest international gateway anywhere in the world, the sceptics have fallen silent. DXB processed 66.4 million people in 2013; DWC’s newly re-named Al Maktoum International Airport is already accepting passenger flights; and Dubai’s rulers are once again upping the ante. Mindful that their traffic forecasts no longer seem such a distant prospect, the latest annual capacity target has risen from 160 to 200 million. And it could stretch even further, to 240 million.

“Our future lies at DWC. The announcement of this Dh120 billion ($32 billion) development of DWC is both timely and a strong endorsement of Dubai’s aviation industry,” said Paul Griffiths, chief executive of Dubai Airports, the owner and operator of both DXB and DWC, after Dubai’s ruler Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum ratified the latest plans.

“With limited options for further growth at Dubai International, we are taking that next step to securing our future by building a brand new airport that will not only create the capacity we will need in the coming decades, but also provide state-of-the-art facilities that revolutionise the airport experience on an unprecedented scale.”

Dubai’s success stems from geographical advantage and lacklustre competition in Europe. Two thirds of the world’s population lives within eight hours’ flying time of the Gulf, making it an ideal location for the largest hub-and-spoke network on the planet. Factor in the inability of European governments to develop their own airport infrastructure - due to a mixture of blinkered political priorities and anti-competitive regulatory environments - and Dubai’s rising star seems all but inevitable.

Phase One of the DWC development encompasses two satellite buildings with an annual capacity of 120 million and facilities to handle 100 double-decker Airbus A380s simultaneously. Having previously erred on the side of caution when setting deadlines, Dubai Airports has now accelerated the completion of this phase to “between six and eight years”.

That timeframe coincides with projected passenger demand of 100 million at DXB, potentially enabling a wholesale shift of operations by Emirates Airline, Dubai’s flag carrier, to DWC around the turn of the decade.

In practice, however, Emirates is likely to stay put at DXB at least until the mid-2020s. The DWC project has already encountered numerous delays - construction work slowed after the 2008 global financial crisis, when the blueprint was scaled down from six to five runways - and further obstacles are all but guaranteed, being the norm for large-scale infrastructure projects. Even once the satellite buildings are completed, shifting the flag carrier’s entire operation will be a herculean task that itself requires months of planning.

Expansion work therefore continues apace at the existing DXB facility. Under the Dubai Airports Strategic Plan 2020, Dh28.8 billion ($7.8 billion) is being invested to lift DXB’s annual capacity to above 100 million by the end of the decade. The plan envisages an additional 675,000 sq m of floor space across the gateway - twice the footprint of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 - thanks largely to the completion of a brand new concourse next year.

“We’ve got Concourse D coming onstream which, with a few other improvements, will take us over 90 million [capacity in 2015],” Griffiths recently confirmed to The Gulf. “We’ve also got some tactical improvements to the way we handle the air traffic control systems."

"That will give us some very significant improvements in the flow rate, and give us some very significant upgrades in our ability to handle the number of air traffic movements that we need to handle. So, all in all, there’s a lot of different initiatives going on that will actually give us the ability to get to our demand of 103.2 [million] by 2020," he added.

With space at DXB dwindling, Griffiths admitted that the scope for any further expansion beyond 2020 will be limited to yet more “technical and flow-process enhancements” that optimise existing facilities. “So [at that point] we are going to have to bite the bullet and start the construction of the second phase of DWC,” he confirmed.

Though upgrading two mega-hubs in tandem may seem an excessively ambitious task, there are in fact some symbiotic advantages to the strategy. This summer, for example, the consecutive closure of DXB’s two runways for resurfacing work gave an operational fillip to both hubs. As well as enhancing DXB’s facilities with additional taxiways and rapid runway exits, the 80-day refurbishment programme allowed DWC to get its first taste of significantly increased passenger operations.

A total of 18 airlines requested landing slots at DWC between May and July. Six of those carriers were already serving the new airport - which began accepting passenger flights in October 2013 - while the other eight were brand new to the facility. This spike in activity resulted in DWC processing 476,000 passengers during the second quarter, more than quadrupling its Q2 2013 figure. At the height of operations, 600 passenger flights a week were being flown to and from the fledgling base.

Alongside this growth in passenger traffic, freight volumes at DWC have also been steadily rising since the first cargo flight landed at the airport in June 2010. The latest milestone came in May 2014 when Emirates SkyCargo, the flag carrier’s freighter division, relocated to the hub. It joined 35 other scheduled and charter freight operators, pushing second-quarter cargo volumes up to 200,000 tonnes, again four times higher than the same period last year.

With four scheduled passenger airlines maintaining their presence at DWC after the DXB runway work ended - Bahrain’s Gulf Air, Kuwait’s Jazeera Airways, Qatar Airways and Hungary’s Wizz Air - the airport is being put through its paces ahead of the immeasurably vaster passenger flows to come.

Building a world-class airport, however, requires much more than super-sized facilities. Emphasising the need for a “quantum leap in thinking” when it comes to airport design, Griffiths has promised to fundamentally re-conceptualise the experience of transiting through an international gateway. “You need to design the building around the ultimate way in which it will be used,” he explained. “We’re not going to base the architectural design on the conventional understanding of the current airport process … The customer service requirement will drive the architectural design.”

Contemporary airport structures reflect the preconceived notion that passengers must converge on a single, central space, before processing their documents and continuing their onward travel. This reliance on check-in counters is little more than a hangover from the days before self-boarding was introduced. It will not be preserved in DWC.

“Taking a fresh view and starting again, you can design very positive product features that other airports that are growing incrementally only dream of,” Griffiths enthused. “I’m talking about … a journey that is much more slick and efficient.”

Instead of relying on manned counters in the terminal, DWC will exploit “distributed processing” to ensure that passengers can check in and drop off their bags at various stages of the landside journey. Individuals who travel by train to the airport, for example, will be invited to deposit luggage when first entering their local railway station.

They will also be able to use a single electronic token containing their train ticket, boarding pass, baggage tag, and perhaps also biometric identity documents. As well as reducing bottlenecks by devolving check-in to the “first point of call” - be it a train station, a limousine service, or simply online check-in at home - distributed processing will streamline the customer experience and enable a more stress-free, enjoyable journey. This will further be enhanced by way-finding facilities that can interact with personal handheld devices, although Griffiths admitted that an industry-wide standard has yet to emerge in this field.

“Things move on so quickly,” he noted. “You find when you’re designing technological solutions that things which were not possible when you were thinking it through suddenly are. So we have to be careful that we invest at the right rate.”

Taken together with the DWC aerotropolis - a confluence of six clustered zones spanning 140 square kilometres and encompassing real estate developments, entertainment facilities, and free trade areas - Al Maktoum International Airport will become an entirely new proposition for global travellers. The decision to lift DWC’s projected capacity to 200 million reflects the progress already made by flag carrier Emirates and its affiliate flydubai. By 2020, when the second phase of development kicks into gear, it is expected that aviation will contribute about 32 per cent of the emirate’s GDP.

“The longest journey starts with the first step, and this is a giant leap ahead for Dubai’s constantly growing aviation infrastructure,” a government official remarked in 2005, shortly after the first DWC plans were unveiled. With the latest project update, Dubai has made another stride forward. And the protestations of naysayers have faded further into distant memory. – TradeArabia News Service

This feature appeared in the October 2014 edition of The Gulf.