Work on Long Thanh airport seen on schedule

ACV has urged the consortium to speed up the completion of the feasibility study for the first phase of the big-ticket project so that it can be submitted to the relevant ministries and agencies for feedback in June and its amended version sent to the legislative National Assembly for consideration and approval.

Also, the environmental impact report for the first phase, issuedby the consortium between the Institute of Transport Science and Technology and the Center of Environment and Applied Ecology, has been completed on schedule. The report was submitted to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment for appraisal and approval onMarch 19.

According to ACV, the government of Dong Nai Province is making every effort to finish site clearancefor the current phase by the end of this year so that available land canbe handed over to the investor for bomb and mine clearance.

As a result, work on the project is likely to start in late 2020 as scheduled. “The entire site clearance project, which covers 5,000 hectares of land, will be complete by the end of 2020,” the statementsaid.

Long Thanh will be put into operation in 2025 if the project maintains its current rate of progress.The airport is designed to handle up to 100 million passengers and five million tons of cargo per year once the three construction phases are complete.

In the first phase,slated for completion by 2025, the airport will have one runway and one passenger terminal able to accommodate 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of cargo per year.

The second runway and terminal will be built in the second phase to raise the airport’s annual capacity to 50 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of cargo.

The project costs an estimated VND336.6 trillion, or US$16.03 billion, with VND114.5 trillion assigned for the first phase, based on the 2014 exchange rate between the Vietnamese dong and the U.S. dollar.