Why China and India Are Building Airports So Fast

London has been arguing about one extra runway at Heathrow since the 2000s. In the same period, China has opened dozens of airports, and India has roughly doubled its count. The two countries now run the largest airport-building programmes on the planet.

It’s tempting to read this as a simple story about fast-growing economies. The real picture is more interesting. Both countries are building two very different kinds of airport at once: giant hubs for cities that have outgrown their old airports, and small regional airports meant to connect places that have never had air service at all. The first kind usually fills up quickly. The second kind is where the empty terminals are.

China: the megahub model

In September 2019, Beijing opened Daxing International Airport, a starfish-shaped terminal designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The airport itself cost about 120 billion yuan (approx. $17 billion), and far more once the new rail and road links are included. It took less than five years to build and opened with four runways, designed eventually to handle around 100 million passengers a year.

Daxing wasn’t built on a hunch. Beijing Capital Airport had become one of the busiest in the world and was running out of space. Shanghai had solved the same problem years earlier by adding Pudong alongside Hongqiao. In June 2021 Chengdu opened Tianfu International, becoming the third Chinese city with two international airports. The first phase alone cost about $10.8 billion.

Two things make this speed possible, and neither is easily copied. First, the state controls land, planning and most of the money, so the long public inquiries and court challenges that slow Western projects are largely absent. Second, the airlines are there waiting. China’s big three carriers, Air China, China Eastern and China Southern, all need hub space in exactly these cities. A new megahub in China usually has its customers lined up before it opens, which is the opposite of the white-elephant pattern.

China’s other airports: small, remote and often loss-making

Most of the new airports in China’s plan are not Daxing. They’re small regional airports, many in the less populated west and centre of the country. Here the logic is different. Beijing treats them partly as public infrastructure, like a road or a hospital, meant to connect remote areas and support tourism and development.

That means many of them lose money, and Chinese reporting has said so openly for years. One often-cited example is an island airport in Liaoning province refurbished in 2008 with plans for tens of thousands of passengers a year; a few years later it was handling fewer than 4,000. The question with China’s regional airports isn’t really “will it be profitable?” It’s “is the connection worth the subsidy?” That’s a political choice, not an aviation one.

India: from 74 airports to about 160

India’s growth has come from a different direction. For decades its air travel was concentrated in a handful of big cities. Then low-cost airlines, led by IndiGo, made flying affordable for millions of people who had only ever taken trains. By 2024 India had become the world’s third-largest domestic aviation market by capacity, behind only the US and China.

The government’s tool for spreading this beyond the big cities is UDAN, a regional connectivity scheme launched in October 2016. The idea: the state pays airlines a subsidy (called viability gap funding) to fly routes to small airports, and in return the airline caps fares on part of each flight. Many old, unused airstrips were revived this way. Official figures put India at about 160 operational airports by March 2025, up from 74 in 2014.

The catch: routes that don’t survive the subsidy

India’s own auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), took a hard look at UDAN in 2023. Its findings were blunt. Of 774 routes awarded in the first three rounds, 403, or 52%, had never started flying at all. Of the ones that did start, only 112 completed their three-year subsidised period. And only 54 routes kept operating after the subsidy ended.

That’s the same lesson Spain learned the hard way. A subsidy can get an airline to try a route. It can’t make the route profitable once the money stops. Where local demand exists, the route survives. Where it doesn’t, the airport goes quiet again.

India’s megahubs are arriving too

India is now building its own second-airport projects for cities that have outgrown their first one. Navi Mumbai International began commercial flights on 25 December 2025, taking pressure off Mumbai’s cramped Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport; its first phase is sized for 20 million passengers a year. Noida International at Jewar, about 75km from central Delhi, was inaugurated on 28 March 2026 as a second gateway for the capital region.

These are the airports most likely to succeed, for the same reason Daxing did. Mumbai and Delhi already have more demand than their existing runways can handle. The new airport doesn’t have to invent passengers; it absorbs the overflow. The harder part, as Montreal’s Mirabel showed, is getting people there. Both new airports sit well outside the city centre, so their success depends heavily on the rail and road links being finished on time.

What the two programmes have in common

• Hubs in overcrowded cities work. When the old airport is full, a new one fills fast.
• Regional airports are a policy bet. They connect remote places, but many never pay their own way.
• Speed comes from the state. Both countries can acquire land and approve projects far faster than the UK can, which is exactly why the Heathrow third runway has taken decades.

Sources & Further Reading

• China’s civil aviation sector soars in 2024 — Gov.cn ↗
• China aims to have 450 airports by 2035 — aviation regulator ↗
• Beijing opens Daxing airport — CNBC ↗
• Chengdu Tianfu International Airport — Airport Technology ↗
• India’s airports increase from 74 to 160 — All India Radio News ↗
• CAG highlights gaps in the RCS-UDAN scheme — Factly ↗
• India’s New Navi Mumbai International Airport Opens — Aviation Week ↗