Battling The Bottleneck

Incheon Airport’s new Terminal 2 is open for business, but there are still challenges ahead for this growing hub

- Craig Bright

Standing calmly in a shuffling queue at Incheon Airport, the words “emergency status” hardly jump to mind. Yet for Seoul’s primary airport, these are precisely the words used by its president and CEO, Il-Young Chung, as the airport attempts to process millions more passengers than it has the capacity to handle.

While provocative, Chung’s words were a fair assessment of the status of the airport prior to its recent expansion. In the 16 years since it opened, Incheon has managed to hit its 54 million-passenger capacity and then some. Last year it processed a total of 62.2 million travelers, and this year’s figure looks like it will be even higher.

It’s little wonder that the development of the airport’s new Terminal 2 building which opened in January was at the forefront of Incheon International Airport Corporation’s list of priorities. Recent spikes in numbers at Incheon Airport have hastened this need.

In 2016, the airport’s passenger traffic jumped a massive 17 percent compared to the previous year (by comparison, Beijing Capital International Airport, the busiest in Asia-Pacific, grew just 2.6 percent), and in 2017 Incheon saw another 7.5 percent added to the passenger count. The airport’s growth has been such that Airports Council International ranked it the world’s 19th busiest airport in 2017 – up from 29th in 2012, just five years ago. “We didn’t expect such a fast increase in passenger numbers in the past,” says Chung.

Now that it’s open, Terminal 2 will relieve some of the pressure – for the foreseeable future. The new facility is designed to add 18 million passengers to the airport’s overall handling capacity, bringing the total to 72 million.