(Yicai Global) March 24 -- A new airport opened in China’s southern Guangdong province today, further accelerating the creation of a world-class airport cluster in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Zhanjiang Wuchuan Airport, located in the southwest of Guangdong, has replaced the original Zhanjiang Airport, which was built in 1936.

The new one is a so-called 4E domestic trunk airport, meaning it can take wide-body planes such as the Airbus A330 and the Boeing 777 and handle direct flights to Europe and the United States, Yicai Global learned. And its facilities are designed to handle 5.1 million passengers and 30,000 tons of freight a year.

Zhanjiang Wuchuan Airport is one of four regional air hubs in Guangdong and will provide strong support for the economic development of the province’s western area.

According to a plan unveiled in January, Guangdong will build a civil transport system consisting of three international hub airports, four regional hub airports, and eight branch airports, and join hands with the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao to build a world-class airport cluster.

A number of airport expansion projects are also under way in the bay area. The third phase expansion of Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport began in September 2020 and is scheduled to be put into use in 2025. Work on a third runway at Hong Kong International Airport is ongoing and is expected to wrap up in 2024.

The density of airports in the bay area is relatively high, Lin Jiang, a Lingnan College economics professor at Sun Yat-sen University, told Yicai Global. So they need to find their own positioning and rationally allocate resources to avoid vicious competition, Lin added.

For example, Zhanjiang Wuchuan Airport, which mostly targets domestic air routes, can prioritize the development of logistics to become the bay area’s freight station to Yunnan and Guizhou provinces as well as the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Lin noted.

The bay area’s airports, excluding those in Hong Kong and Macao, completed a total passenger throughput of 87.2 million in 2021, down 4.6 percent from 2020, with the annual freight throughput up 14.2 percent from 2020 at 3.7 million tons, statistics from the Civil Aviation Administration of China showed.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Peter Thomas