President Shavkat Mirziyoyev attended the groundbreaking ceremony marking the start of the New Tashkent international airport and will be located in Tashkent province, the president’s press service said.
Reportedly, over the past eight years, passenger traffic to the Tashkent city tripled, reaching 9 million people per year, and is expected to surpass24 million by 2040.
The current airport, designed to handle 11 million passengers annual throughput capacity and located within the city borders, cannot be expanded. Therefore, the authorities made a decision to build a new international airport on a 1,300-hectare site in Ortachirchiq and Quyichirchiq districts of Tashkent province.
The project will be implemented under public-private partnership terms. Private partners include Vision Invest (Saudi Arabia), Sojitz Corporation (Japan), which will invest “tens of billions of yen” in the project, and Incheon International Airport Corporation (Republic of Korea).
The project will comprise four phases, with an airport terminal complex and airfield to be erected in $2.5 billion phase I.
Once completed, the airport’s throughput capacity will rise up to 20 million passengers and 129,000 tons of cargo annually, with up to 30 takeoffs and landings per hour, feature 14 passenger jet bridges and simultaneously park 62 aircraft. The duty-free zone will cover 46,000 sqm.
Special attention will be given to environmental sustainability — the airport will be fully powered by renewable energy sources, becoming the first in the country to operate entirely on green energy.
Modern air navigation and meteorological systems will allow aircraft to land and take off in all weather conditions.
The airport will reportedly be part of the multimodal transport hub. The new complex will be directly connected to the Tashkent to Samarkand, Tashkent to Andijan and Tashkent to Bostanlik paid motorways.
A modern railway station will also be built nearby servicing high-speed trains, while shuttle transport will connect the downtown Tashkent and New Tashkent cities.
The project is expected to generate more than $27 billion in revenue for the country, promote the development of services, industry and tourism, as well as create thousands of new jobs.
The airport should meet the standards of world-class transport infrastructure such as those in Singapore, Dubai and Seoul, the president’s press service noted.
Shavkat Mirziyoyev said the airport project would lay the foundation for turning Uzbekistan into a regional aviation hub connecting East and West, North and South. He added that in the next five years, the country’s aircraft fleet would expand to 180 planes, the number of routes to 230 and annual flight operations to 200,000.
The president placed a capsule in the foundation of the New Tashkent international airport, officially launching its construction. He thanked foreign partners, financial institutions and tourism representatives attending the ceremony, and expressed confidence in the engineers and builders.
