Luanda's Grand, New Airport Project

Under current construction, Luanda’s new international airport is designed to be one of Africa's biggest and rival Johannesburg airport, in South Africa, as a traffic distribution hub for the region.   The new airport is being constructed some 40 kilometres outside the Angolan capital, in Bom Jesus, in the Viana municipal area, will have runways capable of receiving what is currently the largest passenger aircraft in the world, the Airbus A380.

“The size of the project, which is obvious from the length and layout of the runways, was decided in order to turn the airport into a hub that is capable of taking traffic away from Johannesburg airport destined for countries in Central and East Africa that use it for that purpose,” according to the Africa Monitor news service.

" The key idea,” it added, is that a big airport in Angola, “with a size capable of making it the second-largest facility of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa,” will be heavily used as a transit point for passengers traveling on to countries such as the democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Namibia, Zambia, Uganda, Kenya and even Tanzania. 

The new airport, which has been under construction since 2008, covers an area of almost 10,000 hectares and will have two double runways capable of landing the Airbus A380, 12 departure tunnels as well as restaurants, offices, a hotel nearby and a rail link to the capital city and, possibly, with the neighboring province of Malanje.  The new terminal building will have an area of 160,000 square meters (1.8 million square feet) to enable a capacity of up to 15 million passengers per year.   The area of the cargo terminal building will be 6,200 square meters, capable of handling of 35,000 tones of cargo per year.

Construction of the new airport is in the hands of a consortium of Chinese companies and Brazilian company Odebrecht and the first phase of the new airport may be concluded in 2012. (Africa Monitor)