Travelers wearing face masks queue at immigration counters upon arriving at Ninoy Aquino … [+]
A consortium that includes billionaire Lucio Tan’s MacroAsia and partners from the Philippines, South Korea and Europe has been awarded the $11 billion contract to build an international airport south of Manila that could help ease congestion at the country’s main gateway.
The new airport will be built at Sangley Point, a former U.S. airbase in the province of Cavite, about 25 kilometers south of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), which was once voted as the world’s worst airport. The Sangley Point International Airport (SPIA) will initially be developed as a two-runway facility that can handle 80 million passengers per annum, expandable to four runaways with an annual capacity of up to 130 million passengers.
“With the development of the first runway, SPIA can operate as a satellite runway to immediately relieve the extreme congestion of the runway at NAIA,” the consortium said in a statement. Built over 70 years ago, NAIA is among the world’s most overcrowded airports. It handled about 48 million passengers in 2019 just before the Covid-19 pandemic grounded international flights, way above the airport’s design capacity of 30 million passengers annually.
The consortium is co-led by House of Investments—controlled by the family of late Philippine tycoon Alfonso Yuchengco—and Cavitex Holdings. South Korea’s Samsung C&T Construction along with Germany’s Munich Airport and Ove Arup & Partners Hong Kong Ltd. are also part of the group.
SPIA—which will include integrated logistics and aviation facilities along with road and rail links—is competing with billionaire Ramon Ang’s San Miguel to develop an alternative to NAIA. San Miguel is constructing a $15 billion mega airport with a capacity to handle 100 million passengers annually on a sprawling 2,500 hectare (25 million square meters) site in Bulacan province, about 40 kilometers north of Manila.