HISTORY
remove the water from inside to the outside, and from the outside we’d take the ocean sand to the inside to make the land that the airport occupies today.
“When we finished this work, if you viewed the airport site from above it looked like a desert because there was nothing else here but sand, and when we had strong winds we literally got covered in it.”
It took workmen an estimated ‘13.8 million man-years’ to reclaim the 4,743 hectares of land from the sea necessary to build Incheon, yet Kang believes that it was one of the easiest parts of the entire project as it involved much less manpower and machinery than the terminal’s construction.
In then took a two-year process to create the foundations for the new terminal. He freely admits that both before and during the construction process he and his management team regularly visited a handful of new build airports to learn from their experiences – both good and bad.
The airports they benchmarked themselves against included Denver, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong and Kansai – the latter two in particular, as both had recently been built on reclaimed land.
“They were fact-finding missions,” says Kang. “None of us had built an airport before, let alone open one, so we had a lot to learn and we had to learn fast.
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“We wanted to know how they did things and what they would change if they turned the clock back. It was a huge learning curve for all of us.”
Kang says that some of the best advice he received was in Denver when a senior manager, dismayed by problems with their new computerised baggage handling system, warned him to take nothing for granted in terms of promises. “He told me not to take anything for granted unless I saw it with my own eyes,” says Kang. “He also said that the best way to stay on top of things was to count on nobody but myself.” Shortly after receiving this advice, Kang decided to move to the airport site to personally oversee the daily construction process. “I worked for the airport for eight years, six of which were during its construction,” notes Kang. Much to the relief of everyone after weeks of rainy, foggy and windy weather, the airport opened on “a beautiful sunny day”, recalls Kang.
And he says that despite the usual pre-opening day concerns about everything being ready and operational in time for the opening, everything “worked perfectly on the day”. Six months of operational trials to test the airport’s new state-of- the-art IT systems, baggage handling equipment, boarding bridges, moving walkways and other technology certainly paid off. Kang actually says that the most difficult part of the airport’s construction was facing a lot of unfair media criticism of the project, much of it he believes driven by politics.
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