New int`l airport opens today

With the goal of becoming the hub airport of Northeast Asia in the 21st century, Incheon International Airport (IIA) will make a historic opening Thursday.

The airport will open its doors as a new gateway to Korea, starting with the landing of Asiana Airlines` flight No. OZ3423 from Bangkok at 5 a.m. and the takeoff of Korean Air Lines (KAL) flight No. KE621 bound for Manila at 8:30 a.m. The first cargo plane arriving at the airport will be KAL flight No. KE582 from Sydney at 5:50 a.m. and the first one departing from the airport will be KAL flight No. KE503, which will head for Milan via Tashkent.

Once opened, the airport will serve 354 flights a day on average, much more than the 250 flights that landed or took off daily from Kimpo International Airport. IIA is also equipped with passenger and cargo terminals that can handle 27 million passengers and 1.7 million tons of freight a year. There are also two runways to allow 170,000 landings and takeoffs.

On Wednesday, a day ahead of the opening, the IIA Authority and airline companies were busy making final preparations by transporting goods from Kimpo to Incheon airport by mobilizing 14 towing tractors, each of which weighs 40 to 50 tons, and 1,060 large cargo trucks. Officials said that nearly half of the goods to be moved from Kimpo were transported to the IIA that day.

``We are determined to make a success of the largest-ever airport move so that the airport will open as scheduled. Once it opens, we will make efforts to develop it into the hub airport of Northeast Asia as soon as possible,`` said an airport official.

Yonhap