The largest airport terminal in the world - Beijing Capital International Airport’s Terminal

China inaugurated the largest airport terminal in the world on Friday, a soaring golden-roofed structure evoking a flying dragon.

Nearly 2 miles long, the $3.8 billion terminal, which covers 240 acres, is the world’s largest covered structure.

“Our Chinese people should be very proud when they pass in and out of this airport,” Aviation Minister Li Jiaxiang told journalists.

Employing 50,000 laborers at the peak of construction, the terminal at Beijing Capital International Airport was built in three years and nine months to cope with the expected deluge of visitors to the Beijing Summer Olympics.

“It was incredibly fast. Even by Chinese standards, it was fast,” said Rory McGowan, a director of the London-based engineering firm Arup, one of several partners on the project.

One of the 10 busiest airports in the world, Beijing’s airport handled 53.5 million passengers last year, far above its capacity of 35 million. With the new terminal, the airport can handle 96 million passengers a year and 1,590 flights a day. By 2012, the airport will become one of the five busiest in the world.

Terminal 3, as the new terminal is called, is double the size of two other terminals. Even with the addition, however, China’s aviation growth will make the airport suffer overcrowding again within seven years, experts say.

British architect Norman Foster, the terminal’s designer, noted the building’s scale in a statement to the Chinese news media this week: “It’s so big that under a certain amount of light you can’t see one end of the building from the other.”

The terminal has 64 restaurants, 175 escalators, 173 elevators and 437 moving sidewalks — but no bookstore that sells foreign-language periodicals. Censorship is still imposed in China, and average Chinese are not exposed to the kinds of critical views common in the media of democratic countries.

Without a critical press or political opposition, Chinese officials summarily moved nine

Beijing Subway Map
Simple Rube Golberg 3D animaton