King Khalid International Airport

King Khalid International is the primary airport of Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh and one of the largest airports in the world by land area, spanning 225 sq km (87 sq mi) at 2,049 ft (625 m) elevation on the desert plateau 35 km (22 mi) north of the city. RUH handles roughly 37M passengers (2024), growing rapidly as Saudi Arabia executes its Vision 2030 tourism and aviation transformation plan — the kingdom targets 330M passengers annually across its airport system by 2030, with RUH designated as a primary hub. Saudia operates Riyadh as a major hub alongside its Jeddah base, and in 2024 Riyadh Air — a new PIF-owned full-service international carrier ordered specifically as a Riyadh-based competitor to Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad — announced RUH as its exclusive hub, with launch service from 2025 on an initial Boeing 787-9 fleet scaling to 132 widebody aircraft on order. flynas, flyadeal, Gulf carriers, Turkish, British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France, KLM, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Emirates all fly scheduled service. The route map reaches 109 destinations across 62 airlines. Two closely spaced parallel runways — both 15L/33R and 15R/33L at 13,796 ft (4,205 m) — support five passenger terminals (T1–T5) arranged around a central Royal Terminal and mosque plaza, designed by HOK in the 1970s in a monumental four-square layout with distinctive triangular concrete pylons and Islamic geometric motifs. The King Khalid airport design remains a reference point in regional airport architecture. A mega-expansion announced in 2022 envisions King Salman International Airport — essentially a rebuild-and-expand of RUH — spanning 57 sq km of new terminal complex with six parallel runways and a target 120M annual passengers by 2030, which would place it among the top-five airports worldwide.