Xīn lóng International Airport - Terminal 2 Groundbreaking

Expansion and growth are the bywords for Chinese civil aviation and so it is only fitting that my Xin Long diorama has reached capacity and needs a new terminal! This post is the start of a series following planning and construction of Terminal 2, which will more than double capacity at my airport.

As you can see at the layout page of the Xin Long website the existing terminal 1 complex is a quite small two pier terminal of 12-13 gates. Since my Chinese collection is getting close to 250 models that hardly feels suitable to display a portion of it. I've recently added on a taxiway and runway component but now the next step is a new terminal.

Firming up the new layout

The new terminal will use the same construction methods as the first and share a common style to its form but will hopefully also have a distinctive look too. An e-mail request at work was successful in acquiring more headphone packaging that I could use for the piers (as I did before). I also had a ready made main terminal building in the previous main terminal of my old 1:600 scale Imogenia airport. This main terminal is made up of cardboard though it certainly needs a sprucing up.

The new 'left' pier

The new terminal will have two main piers. As per usual I'm striving for a realistic layout here - no immensely long single width taxiways with gates on both sides here. The left pier is shorter and matches the length of the terminal 1 pier next door. Fitting with the deeper piece of wood the second pier is longer and ends in a satellite style ending. There's also room for a couple of other gates in the corner, though it's unclear whether they'll be part of the terminal or not.

The new 'right' pier

The left pier will have 6 full time gates with at least one of them A380 capable and 3 or 4 widebody gates. The right pier will fit 13 gates only 2 of which will be widebody capable (though 4 others can fit a 757). In the below shot you can see how the new left pier will share the taxiway with terminal 1's West pier:

With the pencil mapping done the first step is to masking tape together the pier components into their shapes.

Once that was done it was time to give them their cardboard bases just as I did for terminal 1. See this earlier blog post for more detailed instructions.

The next step is the painting so it's out with more masking tape. The results of that will be in the next instalment.