… China’s fast development has led in cases to cut corners and lax safety standards, putting many of its signature developments under a new light.

Terminal 3 turns out to be no exception after the state-run China Daily reported that part of the terminal’s roof was ripped open by a strong wind on Tuesday. “Dear Tom Friedman, how’s ‘be more like China’ working out these days?” wrote one wag on Twitter, referring to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and his generally high regard for Chinese infrastructure projects.

Not so fast, says Shao Weiping, executive chief architect of Beijing Architectural Design and Research Institute, which worked with Foster & Partners on the project. Speaking to the China Daily, he said the damage could be the result of pieces improperly supplied or installed:

… “The metal roof technology used to build T3 was a mature one that has stood tests for more than 20 years,” he said, adding he personally believed that this could be more of a quality-related issue.

See also “Quality is Weightier than Mount Tai”; Reporters Allege Shady Building Practices via CDT. Another aspect of the same general problem is that skill development has frequently lagged behind the rush of construction. Poor maintenance has been blamed for problems with escalators on the Beijing subway, while inadequate training and other human error has been implicated in both the Shanghai Metro and Wenzhou high-speed rail crashes.

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Post tags: airport building, architecture, Beijing airport, construction project, overdevelopment, safety
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The new airport, which is likely to be approved within the year, will probably have eight runways for civilian use and a ninth for military use, Yao Weihui, general manager of China United Airlines, said at a ceremony marking the delivery of the airline’s 10th Boeing plane on Monday ….

“The suggested location (for the new airport) in Daxing district is a place with few residents and buildings, so many runways can be built,” Wang said, adding the Beijing Capital International Airport in the northeast cannot have a fourth runway because of its location.

There has been a plan to build a second airport in the city for years. The new airport will shoulder part of the traffic pressure faced by Beijing Capital International Airport, which is now the world’s second largest in terms of passenger traffic [behind Atlanta].

Last year, the Beijing Capital International Airport handled 73.9 million passengers, close to its planned capacity of 76 million passengers by 2015.

The likely high traffic of the new airport—up to 60 million passengers a year once it is complete—will truly set it apart: according to the Financial Times, “around three quarters of China’s 175 gleaming airports are losing money, many are barely used and some don’t have any flights at all.“

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In making his ruling, Fair Work Australia Commissioner Frank Raffaelli said he was unimpressed with the way Qantas had carried out its investigation into Ms Genrich’s case.

“The implication of Qantas’s action is that there is a restriction on the practice of her spiritual beliefs in private, which is contrary to both Australian and international law,” Commissioner Raffaelli said in his judgement, which was obtained by The Epoch Times.

“Given that they were seeking to take disciplinary action against the Applicant (Ms Genrich), the most important thing would have been to have ascertained exactly the level of the Applicant’s transgression in the eyes of that (Chinese) Government.

“This, they failed to do.”

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Post tags: Beijing airport, Falun Gong, Qantas, Sheridan Genrich
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Reflections at the Beijing Airport, by frankartculinary

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On Friday, the former head of the company that runs airports in Beijing and more than 30 other Chinese cities was put to death after the People’s Supreme Court upheld his sentence in a $16 million bribery and embezzlement case.

Li Peiying’s execution came two days after word emerged that the head of China’s nuclear power program was under investigation for alleged corruption. Just last month, the former chairman of China’s second-biggest oil company, Sinopec, was also convicted of taking $29 million in bribes and given a suspended death sentence.

The heads of state-owned enterprises “possess power and money, making it easy to give rise to corruption,” Wang Yukai of the China National School of Administration was quoted Friday in the Communist Party newspaper Global Times as saying.

China has long struggled against corruption among high-level Communist Party officials, hoping high-profile takedowns will help scare the rank and file straight.

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Beijing Capital International Airport is the main international airport of Beijing, China. It is located 32 km northeast of Beijing’s city center in an enclave of Chaoyang District that is surrounded by rural Shunyi District. The airport is owned and operated by the Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited, a state-controlled company. The airport’s IATA Airport Code, PEK, is based on the city’s former romanized name, Peking.

Part 1:

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Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

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Post tags: Beijing airport, Olympic preparation, Olympics construction
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…Beijing’s new international air terminal, which opened today in time for the Summer Olympics surge, attracts and embodies superlatives. It also embodies the new China, a country racing headlong into the future fueled by an economy on fire.

The airy glass-and-steel structure, even at two miles long and half a mile wide, raced from design to takeoff in four years. Most airport projects take a decade or more to complete and usually involve lengthy reviews, detailed assessments, planning committees, public hearings and environmental impact statements…

Elsewhere across China, skyscrapers sprout, highways unfurl and dams appear at breakneck speed, cutting through neighborhoods and displacing millions of people in the process. This terminal is among about $40 billion worth of projects being built in Beijing alone in advance of the Games, which start Aug. 8.

See also the Telegraph blog: Beijing’s amazing airport

Here is CCTV’s news on the Beijing No. 3 terminal via Youtube:

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Post tags: Beijing, Beijing airport, Olympics construction
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The terminal, built by 50,000 workers in four years after 10 villages were flattened, will increase Beijing Airport’s annual capacity from 35 million passengers to 85 million and make it one of the world’s five busiest airports.

The new terminal alone is almost 20% bigger than all five terminals combined at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Built partly as one of the architectural centrepieces of the 2008 Olympic Games — which open in Beijing on August 8 — it also reflects the explosive demand in air travel as Chinese citizens grow richer and are able to travel freely in ways unimaginable even two decades ago.

A commentary in the Independent compares the experience of building the new Beijing terminal to that of the soon-to-open terminal five at Heathrow:

Lord Foster makes the point succinctly: China has managed to design and build a new airport terminal twice the size of Heathrow’s Terminal Five in four years, less time than the Heathrow planning enquiry. He should know, for he has designed both terminals. China’s new terminal opens this week and Heathrow’s next month, but Beijing Capital airport differs in another respect. It has also, in the past four years, built a third runway, something that will clearly take somewhat longer here.

It is worth making the comparison, not to argue simplistically that we are falling behind in some sort of global economic race, still less that we should adopt the Chinese planning model. There are lots of reasons why we shouldn’t, of which more in a moment. But it would be extremely arrogant of us not to note what China is doing, both to set in context our own economic debates and also to try to see what we can learn from Chinese experience. The very fact of employing a British architect for such a high-profile project shows China is prepared to learn from us. Why should we now try to learn from them?

Read also “A Giant Airport for China’s Vast Ambition” from the BBC (see the video here). Watch a tour of the new terminal via ITN News:

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The newly wealthy citizens of a confident, powerful China will be treated to what is hailed as the world’s biggest building. Designed by Lord Foster and built by the British-based global engineer Arup, the terminal caters for a rapidly expanding middle-class in China, keen to exercise their new financial muscle by taking to the skies. The project was delivered in four years, less time than it took to start even drawing up the plans for Heathrow’s Terminal 5.

Beijing’s reconstruction, and transformation, from a 14th-century capital centred around a cosmological axis and the Forbidden City, has been the most dramatic building project the world has seen in peacetime.

And now it has its airport. It is stunning. A golden roof slopes gently above the glass and steel main structure, and the skylights dotting the top of the building are designed to let natural light into the terminal, which is just under two miles long. They look like the raised scales on a mythical dragon’s back.

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Post tags: architecture, Beijing airport, Olympics construction
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