Grand Terminal 3 at Dubai International Airport opened on October 14. Built at a cost of $4.5 billion, it is also the largest terminal in the world.

Catering to passengers for Gulf countries and the US, movement around the airport’s six floors, most of them underground, has been facilitated by 157 lifts, 97 escalators, 82 moving walkways and 27 truck lifts and eight Sky Trains that can handle 47 people each. For a project of this scale, the car park itself is equivalent to 33 football fields, while the departures area at Level 3 is more than 51 hectares in size, the size of 94 football fields !

A sales assistant in the Dubai duty free shop in the arrivals area, said: “It’s a very beautiful terminal compared to the other ones – very spacious and more like a temple than an airport terminal.”

With just six departure flights and nine arrivals at T3, the 1.5 million sqm glass and chrome building was hardly bustling on day one but T3 is opening in phases and will eventually handle 17,000 passengers at any given time. Emirates Airline will move its entire daily schedule of 250 flights over to the new terminal by December.