Ezhou Huahu Airport

Ezhou Huahu Airport is China's first purpose-built dedicated air-cargo airport and the primary global hub of SF Airlines, the aviation arm of SF Express — China's largest express logistics company. Located in Ezhou, Hubei province, at 86 ft (26 m) elevation in the central-Chinese Yangtze basin, the airport opened in July 2022 as a flagship project of China's national logistics strategy. Modeled explicitly on the Memphis (MEM) UPS and Louisville (SDF) FedEx superhub concepts, Huahu is designed to function as the 'Memphis of Asia' — a dedicated overnight cargo sortation and distribution hub serving roughly 1.5 billion people within a 90-minute flight radius, including virtually all of China's major manufacturing and consumer markets. The airport handles 10 routes across 9 destinations through 7 airlines on the passenger side, but passenger operations are secondary to the airport's primary cargo mission. Passenger service is operated by Hubei-based carriers and major Chinese trunk airlines including China Eastern, China Southern, and Juneyao with domestic links to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and regional provincial capitals. On the cargo side, SF Airlines operates the overwhelming majority of movements with an all-freighter fleet of Boeing 767 and 757 aircraft, and a rapidly growing international freight network that connects to Frankfurt, Osaka, Los Angeles, and major Southeast Asian trade hubs. The airfield features two parallel concrete runways, both 11,811 ft (3,600 m) long and spaced to allow simultaneous independent operations, designed explicitly for heavy-freighter capacity at peak overnight sort times. Huahu is also one of the first Chinese airports with a fully integrated on-site high-speed rail station (Ezhou Huahu Station) connected directly to the passenger terminal — a multimodal design reflecting China's preference for airport-HSR integration at new major facilities. Ezhou's positioning within the Wuhan metropolitan cluster provides immediate access to a dense industrial and consumer market generating the freight volumes the airport was built to handle.