Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport

Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport (DAC), named for the 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Shah Jalal, is the largest and busiest airport in Bangladesh, handling roughly 85 percent of the country's international air traffic and around 12 million passengers a year. Serving Dhaka — one of the world's most populous megacities with a metropolitan population of more than 23 million — DAC is the principal hub of flag carrier Biman Bangladesh Airlines and a key node for overseas-worker traffic to the Gulf and Southeast Asia, one of the largest such migrant-labor flows in global aviation. It is operated by the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB). DAC sits in Kurmitola, about 18 km (11 mi) north of central Dhaka, at an elevation of 30 ft (9 m). A single 11,500 ft (3,505 m) concrete-asphalt runway (14/32) supports all widebody operations up to the Boeing 777 and Airbus A380. The existing Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 have been joined by the flagship Terminal 3 — opened to soft operations in 2023 and fully commissioned progressively since — which adds approximately 230,000 m², 115 check-in counters, 26 boarding bridges and lifts combined airport capacity above 20 million passengers per year, making it one of the most ambitious aviation infrastructure projects in South Asia. Thirty-nine airlines link DAC to 44 nonstop destinations, including dense long-haul networks to the Gulf (Emirates, Qatar Airways, Etihad, flydubai, Saudia, Kuwait Airways, Oman Air, Gulf Air, Salam Air), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Thai, Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, Vietnam Airlines), East Asia (China Southern, China Eastern, China Airlines), South Asia (IndiGo, Air India, SriLankan) and Europe (Turkish Airlines, British Airways via historic service). Biman's own network reaches Manchester, Toronto and Narita, making DAC the only South Asian airport outside India with direct transatlantic and Pacific flights of its scale (2025).