Vietnam’s aviation and military officials reiterated Thursday the necessity of setting up a new airport in Dong Nai Province to ease pressure on Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City, saying the country’s largest airport will not only become overloaded but also face airspace congestion.
Recently proposed plans to expand Tan Son Nhat are thus infeasible as the airspace above the facility cannot be enlarged due to national security issues, the officials said at a media meeting in the southern hub.
Building an airport in Long Thanh District of Dong Nai, right outside Ho Chi Minh City, is the only possible solution to catch up with strong aviation growth in southern Vietnam, with Tan Son Nhat forecast to become overloaded by 2017, according to the officials.
Dong Nai is about 30km east of Ho Chi Minh City.
The Ho Chi Minh City terminal has a design capacity of 25 million passengers a year, and is “expected to pass the 24 million mark by the end of this year,” said Nguyen Nguyen Hung, chairman of the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV).
The expansion of the airport would have to be synchronously carried out on the ground-based facilities and the airspace, Hung said.
Airplanes taking off from and landing at Tan Son Nhat currently have to use part of the airspace zoned for military purposes above the nearby Bien Hoa airport, also located in Dong Nai Province.
Major-General Do Minh Tuan, deputy commander of the Vietnamese Air Force under the Ministry of National Defense, said the airspace over Bien Hoa is undergoing congestion and the situation will continue worsening thanks to increased air traffic.
The military official pressed that it is impossible to relocate the Bien Hoa airport.
“Strategically speaking, the [Bien Hoa] airport is tasked with protecting the eastern airspace, covering the Truong Sa (Spratly) and Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelagos,” he explained.
“So transferring the air traffic to the Long Thanh airport is a must-do task.”
Tuan said the transport and national defense ministries have discussed many temporary solutions, but these can only help reduce the pressure on Tan Son Nhat for two to three years at most.
Map showing the distance between Tan Son Nhat (L), Bien Hoa (top), and the proposed Long Thanh airport A seasoned employee at Tan Son Nhat has asserted that the terminal will not be overloaded
in at least the next 20 years, while it is not really impossible to expand the airport.
Truong Thien, in an op-ed published in Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Wednesday, listed three factors that determine the airport expansion plan, which are the numbers of runways, aprons, and terminals.
Thien said the current two runways at Tan Son Nhat are not associated with the overloading issue as they do not limit the number of airplanes taking off or landing.
The number of airport aprons could well be increased, whereas it is not a complicated task to expand the passenger terminals, according to Thien, who said he has worked at Tan Son Nhat for years.
But Hung disagreed, saying the two runways are close to the overloading limit.
“The runways are receiving 160,000 landings and takeoffs a year, while the safety limit is 188,000,” the ACV chairman said.
While admitting that more aprons can be built, Hung said it is not as easy to expand the passenger terminals as Thien thought.
The international terminal at Tan Son Nhat is capable of receiving 10 million passengers a year, and the domestic terminal 12 million, according to Hung.
“We can increase the capacity of the international terminal to 13 million passengers a year, but there is no space left to expand the domestic one,” he said.
Multibillion-dollar project
Lai Xuan Thanh, head of the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam, also said the two runways currently cannot operate in full swing due to the airspace congestion.
He added that expanding the airport to its north as proposed means relocating 500,000 households and therefore readjusting the city’s overall urban planning.
The Long Thanh airport is projected to require a US$7.8 billion investment for its first phase, ending by 2025.
“Official development assistance loans will account for 29 percent of the investment, while the state budget will contribute 14.6 percent,” Hung of the ACV said.
“We will attract investment from the private sector for the remaining fund.”
The Ministry of Transport said in the investment report of the Long Thanh project that a 5,000 hectare land plot will be cleared to give space to the multibillion-dollar airport.
Total costs for site clearance and compensation is VND18.5 trillion ($870.75 million), according to the report.
It is estimated to cost $18 billion for all three phases of Long Thanh to be completed, Nguyen Hong Truong, Deputy Minister of Transport, told reporters in Hanoi on Friday last week.
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