Incheon International Airport Corporation

The concourses, located in the north of Terminal 1, are a facility to accommodate passengers built to the scale of 166,000m² (16.6 ha) in total area and 918m (0.6mile) in length with two underground and five above-ground floors. The underground floors contain the shuttle train (IAT: Intra Airport Transit) and the baggage handling system (BHS).

 

The exterior design of the concourses, which is based on the tenderness of Korean beauty combined with the country’s high-tech image, harmonizes with the adjacent passenger terminal. Also, the center area of the third floor is a long-span district designed with a column-free space of 55m and serves as a large public area.

Runway 3 has a length of 4,000m (2.5 mile) and a width of 60m (196.9ft). It was designed to be 4,000m long to accommodate the very large and ultra-high-speed aircrafts to be introduced in future and as technical considerations for the increase in the takeoff distance due to temperature increase caused by the global warming, etc. With completion of Runway 3, Incheon International Airport became equipped with two 3,750m (2.3 mile) runways and one 4,000m (2.5 mile) runway that allow it to provide services for the next-generation large-sized and high-speed aircrafts.

Through the second phase construction, a total of 49 passenger aprons, including 30 boarding gates (attached aprons) and 19 remote aprons, were constructed. This took Incheon International Airport one step closer to becoming the hub airport in Northeast Asia in the 21^st century that lives up to its reputation.   

Through the second phase construction, a total of 12 cargo aprons were constructed, with four in the northern area of the cargo terminal and eight in the level 1 eastern area.

The IAT/BHS tunnel is an underground concrete structure that connects the passenger terminals and the concourses, built to accommodate the automated intra-airport transit and the baggage handling system between the passenger terminals and concourses as well as the automated train depot and utility facilities including those for waterworks, electricity, air conditioning, etc.

The apron control tower is a 65m(213.3 ft)-high steel frame structure with one underground and 12 above-ground floors responsible for control of the aprons and aircraft stands. This separate control tower for aprons was built because the airport’s functions were expanded with the phase 2 construction, giving rise to the expectation that the sole operation of the main control tower would cause many problems in the airport’s operation.

Through the phase 2 construction, 67km (41.6 mile) of the baggage handling system was constructed, which is three times the size of the BHS built in the phase 1 construction. The reason for building such a large scale system was the need for the system expansion in the existing passenger terminals and for a transportation system that connects the passenger terminals and the concourses. The most noticeable feature of the BHS built during the phase 2 construction was its implementation of the high speed system (HSS), which remarkably reduced the carriage time taken between the passenger terminals and the concourses (more than 1km(0.6 mile). The maximum speed of HSS is 7m/s(158.8mi/h), which is about three times faster than the maximum speed of a belt conveyor, which is 2.5m/s (5.6 mi/h).

AREX, Korea’s first privately financed railroad project

 

The Airport Railroad Express construction was the first privately financed railroad project in Korea, and it was a large-scale project with the plan to build 10 stations and one train depot within a total distance of 61km (38 mile) and a total construction cost of 4 trillion and 218.4 bil. won(186 mil USD)(The AREX passes through 10 stations in total from Incheon International Airport Terminal 1 Station to Seoul Station including Incheon International Airport Cargo Terminal, Cheongna International City, Gimpo International Airport, and Hongik University. It is an optimal public transportation facility with an average train speed of 70km(43.5 mile), which is about twice that of regular urban trains (30km)(18.6 mile).