Name: The $8B Plan to Make the ‘World's Best Airport’ Even Bigger | WSJ Booked
Uploaded: 2025-07-21T22:50:23.000Z
Duration: 5 min 49 s
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It's got a gigantic indoor waterfall, a butterfly garden, art installations, dinosaurs, and nearly 60 million travellers pass through its four terminals every year.

This is Singapore's Changi, ranked the best airport on the planet for its design, cleanliness and efficiency for 13 years.

We want to make people look forward to coming to the airport, for them to take a holiday, even starting from the airport.

But staying atop the world ranking of airports, while accommodating surges in passenger numbers, is a huge undertaking.

So plans to build a fifth mega-terminal, costing more than $8 billion, able to operate even in a pandemic, represents Singapore's determination to cement its place as a regional travel hub, and to make the best airport in the world, even better.

Air traffic is expected to rise 5% annually in Asia-Pacific, a pace faster than any other region in the world.

Changi's new terminal was conceived to take full advantage of that opportunity.

When completed, Terminal 5 will expand our airport's capacity by more than 50%, and will ensure that Singapore remains a critical gateway for global travel and trade.

Once completed in mid-2030, it will double the size of the airport, allowing 140 million travellers to pass through every year.

It will significantly expand Singapore's aviation hub, which currently makes up 5% of the country's economy, supporting more than 200,000 jobs in various industries, including aerospace, tourism and logistics.

When in 2020, COVID hit the project with a costly two-year delay, the designers used the unexpected pause to rethink their plans.

We redesigned T5 to be more resilient, in particular to operate more safely and flexibly during a pandemic.

The terminal was reimagined as a modular design, able to be split into sub-terminals in varying permutations, such as right down the middle like this, to limit the mixing of air in case of a pandemic.

Instead of a giant roof, the architects broke it up into multiple layered sections, to allow more natural light into the enclosed space.

The terminal will also be powered by clean energy, generated by solar panels on its roofs, with a maximum potential output of 43 megawatts.

That's enough to power 20,000 apartments in Singapore for a year.

But achieving all of this comes at a significant cost.

To ensure sufficient resources to develop our air hub, I will top up the Changi Airport Development Fund by $5 billion.

The Singapore government, which owns the airport, has already spent more than $8 billion on the project altogether, and hasn't ruled out spending more if it needs to.

All that money is meant to send a clear message, that Changi isn't just a stopover, it's the destination.

At the heart of the airport complex is what's known as The Jewel, a $1 billion luxury mall that opened in 2019, featuring more than 260 shops and restaurants.

Its centrepiece is the Rain Vortex, the world's tallest indoor waterfall, at just over 130 feet.

Jewel seamlessly connects Changi's terminals using skybridges and driverless trains, and welcomed more than 80 million local and foreign visitors in 2024 alone.

Also part of the airport, a free 24-hour movie theatre, sleeping pods, an indoor maze, a climbing wall, and foliage everywhere.

We grow our own plants, so from orchids to sunflowers to bougainvilleas, one third of our passengers are transfer passengers.

Sometimes they might not venture out into Singapore, they don't have the time to do so, so we want to give them a glimpse of what they can expect.

And of course, because we are known for our horticulture, our flora and fauna, so we can create that experience even in the airport itself, who knows, maybe next time they will come back again and they will venture out into Singapore.

The airport's biggest boast is probably the ease of movement for travellers.

People don't like to be stuck in queues, so we try to let the passengers have better control as they move through our airport touchpoints, so we have a lot of automation built in.

Changi deploys a biometric data border control system that lets travellers pass through immigration without their passports, cutting down clearance time to just 10 seconds.

Singapore is one of the first countries in the world to implement passportless clearance on a large scale.

While a fully automated system is fast and efficient, it presents staff with a new challenge.

Instead of screening one traveller at a time, immigration officers have to manage multiple passengers among the hundreds of thousands who pass through these automated gates every day.

We help them to hone their profiling skills in terms of things to look out for, try to anticipate the complexities, and then find ways to tackle it because these are uncharted.

Keeping a world-class airport running is expensive, and it's almost impossible without government support.

Nearly every airport on TravelConsultancy Skytrax's top 10 list is either wholly or partially owned by the government.

Public funding helps airports plan for the long term, keep service levels high and still turn a profit, something private operators can find harder to do.

For Singapore, Changi is a symbol of the country's success, an extension of its carefully cultivated reputation for being clean, modern and efficient.

And it's a title the small island nation is determined to hold on to for as long as possible.