Aviation Week
Alan Dron
26 September 2024
Saudi Arabian flag carrier Saudia and the new Riyadh Air, which plans to start operations in 2025, have large orderbooks. Saudi Arabia’s rapid emergence as a tourism destination means that a much larger proportion of future passengers will be in the form of origin and destination (O&D) traffic.
Little wonder, then, that the region’s airports are undergoing a burst of expansion, with new and expanded facilities appearing from the desert sands.
Perhaps most significantly, Saudi Arabia has several airport expansion programs underway or planned. By far the largest is Riyadh’s King Salman International Airport, a six-runway, 57 sq km project that is expected to be the world’s largest airport when it opens in 2030.
The new airport will initially expand, then eventually subsume, the existing King Khalid International Airport (RUH), which plans to grow its annual passenger capacity from 30 million to 120 million as the new airport comes online at the end of the decade.
Similar levels of expansion are taking place at King Abdulaziz International Airport (JED) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s main commercial hub. Already the site of a major terminal project in recent years, capacity will jump from 40 million to 114 million by 2031 following further expansion of the current facility and the creation of a second terminal and fourth runway.
Elsewhere in the country, several other airports are undergoing major expansion or being created from scratch. Abha International Airport (AHB), in the far southwest of the country near the Yemen border, for example, will see its capacity grow from 1.5 million to 13 million when the first phase of a huge expansion program is completed in 2028.
