But three months after its debut, Suvarnabhumi is still struggling with unfinished and inadequate facilities, not the least of which are too few restrooms and very long check-in lines. From a passenger’s viewpoint, the airport at this stage doesn’t look like much of an improvement over Don Muang. Until the new showcase gets a firm handle on operations, which it’s now trying to do on a crash basis, business travelers would be well advised to fly in and out during non-peak hours—or, if convenient, postpone transiting Suvarnabhumi until early spring.
“It’s simply gorgeous,” one awestruck American executive traveler said after seeing the finished terminal for the first time. But that was before traveling herds of mostly leisure passengers descended on Suvarnabhumi. Critics have complained about faulty air-conditioning, unclear signage, and unpainted walls and columns.
Even so, Thais like what they see as they picnic near the runways to watch planes come and go. And taxi drivers praise the airport-city road connections with enough alternate routes to forestall gridlocks.
More than anything, the new airport’s teething problems stem from the rush to begin operating several months before it was ready. Not helping matters was the obviously unscheduled coup that overthrew the government just weeks before Suvarnabhumi’s debut. The bright side of that crisis is that traditionally Thai coups have been mostly peaceful with the king keeping rival parties under his thumb.
Makeshift Don Muang
For veteran flyers the old overburdened Don Muang Airport, now demoted to mostly charter and military flights, always seemed as disorganized as the traffic in Bangkok itself. One blogger wrote: “Arrived Bangkok Airport from Dubai, with a connecting flight to Krabi, and returned a few days later. Be warned that if you have just arrived on an international flight and need to connect with a domestic one, you’re in for quite a walk. Terminal 1 has no aesthetics—it does the basics of the job, and that’s it.”
The main—and credible—excuse for Don Muang’s problems was that it ranked as the fourth busiest airport for travelers in Asia, a role the 92-year-old terminal never expected to play. That led to makeshift solutions over the decades to handle rapidly growing traffic.
Thai words were never short and easy to pronounce, so most western flyers prefer to call Don Muang’s replacement by its anglicized name, New Bangkok International Airport, rather than Suvarnabhumi (su-wan-n-poom) Airport. The Thai name, chosen by His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, means “the golden land” of Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam). The airport code, picked up from Don Muang, is a straightforward BKK.
A Stunning Giant
Altogether, the $4 billion airport is gargantuan—about 6 million square feet of floor space in a seven-story building. It’s a little smaller than Hong Kong International Airport but larger than Seoul’s much-touted Incheon International Airport.
The arrival hall is on level two, the departure hall on four, and full-service restaurants are on six, reachable by escalator from the fourth level. Most shops and traveler services are on floors two and four.
What does the terminal look like? Seen from the outside, one of the most striking aspects is the repeated pattern of curved light-and-dark canopies that cover the concourses and embroider the exterior. Inside, the biggest room is the rectangular, high-ceilinged ticketing pavilion flanked by tubular gate concourses and landscaped gardens at both ends.
Like an Airplane Wing In overall design, the terminal attempts to be user-friendly, emphasizing “passenger circulation” over “aircraft circulation,” as Jahn’s prospectus put it. But so far, that goal has remained largely unfulfilled.
In any case, the steel-and-glass terminal has a modern industrial look. The overhead curves in the walkways suggest a plane’s fuselage. “Think of the concourses as the largest super-jumbo A380 you’ve ever seen on the ground,” as one traveler sums it up, approvingly.
Mixed in with the airport’s somewhat familiar modernistic look are palm trees, warrior statuary, brilliantly colorful murals, and other artwork partly inspired by local critics who thought the early blueprints failed to reflect Thailand’s cultural heritage.
A major architectural innovation is the terminal’s roof trellis, shaped like an airplane wing. It does double duty, unifying the airport’s buildings and providing shade against tropical sunlight as well as lowering air-conditioning costs. It’s a clever design concept—what you would expect from architect Jahn who has prominent skyscrapers and airports worldwide to his credit. Among the best are his State of Illinois Building in Chicago and the Munich Airport.
But some travelers say Bangkok’s cooling system doesn’t seem to—well—cool very effectively, as so often happens with ingenious air-conditioning systems. It is high on the airport management’s fix-it list.
Checking In The central ticketing pavilion, “suspended from the trellis above,” according to the Murphy/Jahn architectural firm, boasts an array of 360 check-in counters on 10 islands, most linked with a baggage-belt system. For security the airport has installed 26 CTX 9000 explosive-scanning devices made by GE-Invision at a cost of $26 million and expects to order 20 more to meet traffic demand. On paper, it all looks efficient, but there are still glitches to be ironed out—some due to delays in staffing all the ticket counters.
For flight operations the airport has two runways and two parallel taxiways to accommodate simultaneous departures and arrivals. There are 120 gates in all, 51 at the terminal, 69 with remote parking bays for wide-bodied aircraft. Five are capable of loading and unloading the Airbus super-jumbo 380, which in fact flew in and out in early December on a round-the-world test flight. Initially, the airport will be able to handle about 45 million passengers annually.
Buying, Booking and Banking In planning Suvarnabhumi, Airports of Thailand, the government agency in charge, thought of almost every service a 2007 international terminal would need. That included installing appropriate seats and toilets for monks, as requested by the Department of Religious Affairs.
Shops: As for time killers for departing or connecting passengers—browsing stores and having a bite—Suvarnabhumi planned for only about half the retail space provided at Hong Kong International Airport, a deficiency the airport is remedying. There will be over 90 shops when all the tenants have moved in. The luxury brands with outlets will include Bally, Bulgari, Cartier, Coach, Dior, Fendi, Ferragamo, Hugo Boss and Mont Blanc. But smart travelers who don’t want to settle for the same old global brands will find a number of shops with indigenous goods from various regions of Thailand.
Travel Services: There are kiosks and counters on Levels 2 and 4 for buying bahts ($US1=B36), booking ground transportation and Bangkok hotels, hooking up your laptop, and other services.
Food: Level 4 has the biggest selection of dining options, but there are some dozens of places to eat, from snack bars and coffee shops to full-service bistros, spread over Levels 2 and 6 as well.
Fitness & Fun: Blueprinted for Levels 2 and 4 are fitness facilities, massage centers and day spas. For travelers who like other ways to relax there are game rooms, karaoke bars and other diversions in the terminal plan.
Hotel: The main airport hotel, a 600-room Novotel operated by the worldwide Accor Goup and close to the terminal, opened on schedule with a full range of travel facilities. And there are two five-story car parks for 5,000 cars between the terminal and the hotel.
Taxis: The main route for taxis between the airport and city is the Bangkok-Chon Buri Motorway (Highway No. 7) which begins as an elevated five-lane highway on the northerly airport grounds and later connects with the city’s outer ring road.
Buses: The Bangkok Mass Transit Authority (BMTA) is operating 11 bus routes to the airport.
Trains: Arguably the cheapest and fastest route into the city will be an 18-mile express rail link informally known as the Pink Line and optimistically predicted to be completed later this year.
The Big Moving Day
When all the kinks are worked out, the new airport will provide a 21st century home worthy of Thai Airways International (www.thaiair.com), rated as one of the world’s best-run international airlines. As the major user of Don Muang Airport, Thai Airways spent years carefully planning the logistics of shifting to Suvarnabhumi, according to Kobchai Srivilas, senior executive vice-president for corporate planning and information technology.
As it turned out, “the mammoth task of moving millions of tons of aircraft and equipment from Don Muang to Suvarnabhumi within roughly 12 hours was one of the largest logistical operations in global aviation history,” Srivilas says. “A critical element of the move was determining the best day of the week, based on the number of aircraft movements, plus the state of traffic along the routes to be used. There were no serious issues, except a small fire in the catering department at Suvarnabhumi, which slightly delayed the move.”
“Even with equipment transported overland, a total of 24 Thai aircraft had to be flown between the two airports,” Srivilas explains. “The distance of 28 nautical miles was covered in 13 minutes with the aircraft flying at an altitude of 2,000 feet at a cruising speed of 210 knots. The first ‘moving flight’ took place at 3 p.m. and the last at 1:45 a.m. The final Thai commercial flight from Don Muang was 662 to Shanghai. The first departure from Suvarnabhumi was 008, a domestic flight to Uthai Thani.”
One of the earliest occupants of Suvarnabhumi was Jetstar Asia, a low-cost carrier and the first foreign airline to begin service out of the new airport with three flights daily to Singapore. Suvarnabhumi publicized the Jetstar debut because in the current whirlwind of budget air services in Southeast Asia, there’s some fear that the new airport will be too expensive for cost-cutting carriers.
Competing with Pac Rim Rivals
If Suvarnabhumi is having start-up troubles, it may come from its avowed, ambitious goal to be the best airport in the Pacific Rim. That’s clear from the imperial message—credible because of the tradition of reverence for the Thai king—that the new airport must face up to the tough competition from other Pac Rim airports in attracting as many airlines, international or regional, as possible for cargo shipments as well as traveler services.
Its heaviest contenders are the new or improved airports at Singapore, Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Seoul, all marketing their new or improved terminals that were built because of the Pac Rim economic boom. The recent growth in regional air traffic has been the fastest in the world. South Korea, for one, promotes its Incheon International Airport as a hub for air transport in “Northeast Asia,” an area designation not that easy to define but a fast-growing region (including Japan, northern China, Russia, not to mention South Korea itself).
With its favorable geographical position for airlines—they can fly to most Southeast Asian destinations in one to two hours from Bangkok—Suvarnabhumi could serve as a regional hub that will match the efficiency and versatility of, say, Singapore’s sophisticated Changi International Airport.
From Cobras to Concourses Politics has haunted Suvarnabhumi as far back as 1960 when there was talk about the need for a new airport.
In 1973, to get the airport project going, the Thai government purchased some 8,000 acres of low-lying marsh land called the “Cobra Swamp.” But along came a student uprising followed by the overthrow of the military government of Thanom Kittikachorn, all of which led to the shelving of the project. It took another 23 years before Suvarnabhumi was revived in 1996 with the formation of the New Bangkok International Airport (NBIA) company.
Not to be spared a few more ups and downs, the airport project got unexpectedly delayed in the late ‘90s when a financial crisis whacked the Pac Rim, particularly Thailand’s banks and real-estate developers. During this shaky period the NBIA went ahead and cleared the marshes to move Suvarnabhumi forward.
In 2002, construction of the airport finally began—and the Airports of Thailand took on NBIA’s responsibilities. At one point in 2004, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (the elected ruler recently overthrown) and several of his cabinet ministers even spent the night in tents at the construction site, hoping to embarrass construction crews into speeding up their work.
More troubles cropped up in late 2005 when the project encountered a series of budget overruns, construction flaws and political interference.
Dry Runs in Wetlands
By mid-2006—at last—there were some 20 domestic flights of six airlines to test the new facility: Thai Airways, Nok Air, Thai Air Asia, Bangkok Airways, PBAir and One-Two-GO. And in early September last year, a Thai B747-400 and A300-600 roundtripped it to Singapore and Hong Kong to be sure Suvarnabhumi was ready to do business.
True to Thai form, there was a coup d’etat this past fall, unseating the prime minister because of accusations of corruption, just before the airport’s opening. But that was treated as just one more blip in the airport’s sequence of delays and surprises.
September 28, 2006 was the due date for celebrations. At 3 in the morning the new airport took over all flights from Don Muang. Among the first in line, a Lufthansa cargo flight arrived at 3:05 a.m., a Japan Airline flight came in at 3:30 a.m., an Aerosvit flight from Kiev arrived at 4:30 a.m., and a Saudi Arabian Airlines cargo flight departed for the capital of Riyadh at 5 a.m.
In a fast turnaround, that Aerosvit jet headed out for Kiev at around 5:30 a.m.—the first passenger departure out of Suvarnabhumi.
On the drawing boards for work in the 2010 to 2020 period are all sorts of Suvarnabhumi add-ons including a separate terminal for low-cost airlines modeled after the budget terminals at Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. And on the far horizon are plans for a possible second terminal, satellite buildings and other additions that will enable the airport to process as many as 100 million passengers annually. That’s enough to make a Thai elephant smile.
Farewell to Don Muang
Before Suvarnabhumi took over, Don Muang was handling up to 800 flights a day and accommodating about 39 million flyers annually. Since the official launch of the new airport, things have not been the same.
Overnight, Don Muang was converted to serve chartered flights and private planes, as well as government, military and police aircraft. The once bustling airport that used to have runway backups and jets circling as they waited to land now sees fewer than 10 flights a day, mostly military aircraft practicing takeoffs and landings. The skeleton staff and crews still working there are lucky if they meet and greet 10 passengers on a typical day. The liveliest day recently was when a charter landed with 157 passengers.
Duangchan Samalak, a luggage security guard, says she has slowly grown accustomed to the quiet at Don Muang—and considers a flight that carries only one passenger a kind of bonanza.
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