Zhuhai seeks excess

ZHUHAI officials expect Beijing approval to reclassify their airport as international by mid-1996, enabling them to proceed with plans to swallow Hong Kong's excess passenger and cargo demand.

The new airport's deputy general manager and senior economist, Bao Zhi, said despite the mammoth project being late in completion and well over budget - and with four other airports to be competing for business nearby - it will prove itself both necessary and profitable in the long term.

'The capacity of Zhuhai Airport and all the advanced equipment we have put into it will make it right to share the surplus of Hong Kong's airport,' Mr Bao said during a site visit.

'We don't want to compete with Hong Kong. We also don't want to compete with the other airports. The market is so large that we can all share the surplus air traffic from Hong Kong.

'But first Zhuhai needs approval from the central government for international flights. We have already asked for that.' The four billion yuan (HK$3.65 billion) project - which was initially budgeted at 300 million yuan - is to be officially opened on March 26 after less than three years of construction.

Although five months late, it will precede by several months the opening of the new Macau International Airport just 30 kilometres away, by more than two years the territory's new airport at Chek Lap Kok, and will join mainland airports in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

Although designated a solely domestic facility by the Civil Aviation Authority of China (CAAC) when construction began in December 1992, it was designed to handle international flights.