Beijing Daxing International Airport

Beijing Daxing International is the newest of the world's largest airports, opened in September 2019 as a purpose-built second gateway for the Chinese capital. PKX serves 174 direct destinations across 44 airlines and was engineered from day one to absorb Beijing's long-term aviation growth from the overloaded PEK, with a current annual design capacity of 72M passengers expanding toward 100M by 2040. The Zaha Hadid Architects-designed terminal is PKX's defining feature: a 700,000 m² starfish-shaped building — the largest single-structure airport terminal in the world by floor area — with five radiating piers reaching outward from a central atrium. The design minimizes maximum walking distance from center to pier-end to roughly 600 m despite the terminal's enormous footprint. Four parallel runways, three at 12,467 ft (3,800 m) and one at 11,155 ft (3,400 m), allow four-stream simultaneous operations — a capacity configuration matched by only a handful of airports globally. PKX sits at 98 ft (30 m) elevation 46 km south of Tiananmen Square, roughly equidistant from Beijing and Tianjin, and anchors the "Xiongan New Area" development zone. China Southern and China Eastern both operate major bases here (both relocated significant capacity from PEK at opening), and the airport is the primary Beijing gateway for SkyTeam partners including Air France, KLM, and Delta. Engineering distinction extends beyond the terminal: the Daxing Airport Express is the fastest airport subway line in China at 160 km/h, and the station underneath the terminal hosts both metro and high-speed intercity rail on dedicated platforms — an integrated transport hub designed as a single multimodal facility rather than an airport with rail bolted on.