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JXB will make O’Hare and London’s Heathrow look small, say officials

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JXB will be home to six, four and a half kilometer runways, and six concourses, two of the six runways will be of CAT III standa

Size isn’t everything, or so we are always politely led to believe. But being the best often involves being the biggest – particularly if you’re doing business in Dubai.

Yes, the emirate that broke the world records for the biggest pizza, the longest cake, the biggest biryani and the largest bowl of spaghetti, has taken the ‘size matters’ philosophy to even greater heights.

It is now fair to say that Dubai is also the proud owner of the world’s tallest hotel - the Burj Al Arab, the world’s biggest shopping mall - the Dubai Mall and the world’s highest high-rise, the Burj Dubai (although the last two are still under construction).

And if all that isn’t enough for them, the list is about to get longer, with an airport so big that it will make London’s Heathrow and Chicago’s O’Hare look like a couple of Fisher Price Play Villages.

Dubai World Central International Airport - or JXB as it is now known, will be the world’s largest airport, being the whopping size of Chicago’s O’Hare and London’s Heathrow combined.

And the proportions are truly mind-blowing. Work on the first JXB runway, due for completion in the first quarter of 2008, is well underway. The four and a half kilometer CAT III runway is designed to handle the new generation Airbus A380 aircraft and will enable JXB, and its adjacent Dubai Logistics City (DLC) to commence operations as the world’s largest freighter airport and logistics hub.

Costing a total of U.S. $8.1 billion for phase 1, JXB has been designed to handle around 120-150 million passengers and 12 million tons of cargo annually. JXB and DLC are part of the US $33 billion Dubai World Central (DWC), the massive ‘city-within-a-city’ taking shape in Jebel Ali, 40 kilometers from the heart of Dubai.

But why does it all have to be so big? Is it really necessary to build to such jumbo proportions?

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