China approves first cargo airport

China's State Council, its Cabinet, approved the country's first cargo-focused airport in Ezhou, central China's Hubei Province on Monday.

As the first cargo airport in Asia, it features a freight transit center with 12 loading docks.

The airport boasts a 52-kilometer sorting line with an average daily package volume of nearly 280,000 units per hour, making it the largest package handling system in Asia.

Located in central China, the airport has operated 62 cargo routes, including 14 international freight routes with the cargo and mail throughput reaching 2.45 million tons.

An Ezhou airport bonded logistics center has also been approved for establishment. The application and construction of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones and airport comprehensive free trade zones have been accelerated in Ezhou.

Being the only professional cargo hub airport in China, Ezhou Huahu Airport has made breakthroughs in digitalization and intelligent operation. Builders of the project have applied for more than 70 patents and copyrights for new technologies, such as 5G, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, for making the new airport safer, greener and smarter.

For instance, there are more than 50,000 sensors beneath the runway for capturing the vibration waveform generated by aircraft taxiing and monitoring runway incursion.

Thanks to an intelligent cargo sorting system, work efficiency in the logistics transfer center has been significantly enhanced. With this smart system, the transfer center's planned production capacity stands at 280,000 parcels per hour in the short term, which can reach 1.16 million pieces per hour in the long run.

As it's a cargo hub airport, freight planes mainly take off and land at night. To save human labor and ensure airport safety and efficiency, airport operators hope that more machines can be deployed to substitute humans for nighttime work.