According to Dubai Airports’ CEO Paul Griffiths, the train ride will be a ’20-minute journey’. The goal is to make the trains ‘fast, efficient, and competitive’, he added.
The new Al Maktoum International (DWC) airport will have an elaborate underground train system that will make the passenger journey easy, with much less walking time.
This was revealed by Paul Griffiths, CEO of Dubai Airport during a session at the Arabian Travel Market (ATM) on Wednesday, who said the aim was to “minimise the travel distance” at the Dh128-billion facility.
“The underground system will be very comprehensive and pretty quick to reduce travel distance,” he said. “It is such a large site that it would be about a 20-minute journey time and we have to make it fast, efficient and competitive in terms of circulation of transfer passengers to get to and from the airport.”
He said that the team at Dubai International (DXB) has been looking at various designs and have agreed that it will have to be a seated train as the journey would take anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes. Earlier, Griffiths had explained that the new airport will have eight smaller airports within one to give a more intimate travel experience.
On Tuesday, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, President of Dubai Civil Aviation Authority, Chairman of Dubai Airports, and Chairman and Chief Executive of Emirates Airline and Group had revealed that Dubai has started awarding contracts for DWC – which will be the world’s largest airport upon completion.
Travelling through DWC
Griffiths further described how traveling through DWC will look like. “If you’re sitting in the lounge with a bubble glass canopy over the top, you can see your aeroplane,” he said. “I’ve just thought of an idea that we could actually project on the glass which aircraft is going where so you know that that’s your plane to New York and you’ve a couple of hundred meters maximum to get there. So we want to create intimacy and scale that.”
He said that the team will use AI to program the most convenient logistics of operations to ensure that passengers breeze through the airport.
DXB airport
Previously, operators of both airports have confirmed that all operations at DXB will be transferred to DWC and that DWC will “fully absorb” DXB’s operations in 10 years. Griffiths confirmed this and said that the focus will be to “redevelop the area” of DCB. “We’re right up against Sharjah in the north, so it will spread the city out and actually make it perhaps a little easier than the traffic problems that we’ve got today,” he said.
Source: Khaleej Time
Published: 30 Apr 2025
