Istanbul is building the world’s largest airport terminal, scheduled to open in 2018, an hour northwest of the city, and is now showing off models and drawings of the new terminal.
Designed to handle 90 million passengers a year and to completely replace the city’s over-crowded Ataturk airport, the new facility will handle all those passengers in a single terminal. The world’s busiest airport, Atlanta, handles 94 million passengers a year. Istanbul expects eventually to add another terminal and be able to handle 150 million.
Despite recent drops in Turkey’s tourism industry due to fears about terrorism, the airport continues to be a major transfer hub for passengers with other final destinations as well as a busy destination.
Construction of the new terminal, near the shore of the Black Sea, stirred controversy among environmentalists when it was first proposed. For more details of the new airport, and a gallery of images from The Telegraph (UK), click HERE.
