On September 18, the landside road and bridge project of the Kunming Changshui Airport Expansion and Renovation Project reached a key milestone. A 17.7-meter-long, 42-ton steel box girder was precisely lifted into place, marking the successful completion of the project's first steel box girder lift. The project has officially transitioned from the substructure construction phase to the superstructure steel structure construction phase, smoothly launching the large-scale lifting of 28,000 tons of steel box girders and laying a solid foundation for subsequent construction and the full-line breakthrough.

The landside road and bridge project of the Kunming Changshui Airport Expansion and Renovation Project is a critical control project for upgrading the airport's capacity and building a three-dimensional integrated transportation system. The project includes two main access viaducts with a total length of 1.25 kilometers, 22 roads on the west side of the terminal area with a total length of 7.86 kilometers, as well as pavement and supporting facilities for the international departure level of Terminal 2. Among these, the main access viaducts, as the regional transportation "main artery," efficiently connect the urban road network, airport terminals, and rail transit system, serving as the core support for building the airport's comprehensive transportation framework.

The project has complex construction conditions and high technical difficulty. The site is located in an area of high fill and high slopes, with a maximum fill height of 54 meters, a longest pile foundation of 88 meters, and a maximum bridge pier height of 41 meters. To overcome construction challenges, the project team adopted the full-casing full-rotation rotary bored pile technique to ensure pile foundation construction quality meets standards. In response to the stringent construction conditions of the project's three-dimensional crossing with the subway, where the minimum vertical distance is only 4 centimeters, an innovative flexible connection construction scheme was used to ensure that the bridge and subway structures do not disturb each other.

In addition, the project involves cross-synchronous construction with more than 10 entities, including Terminal 2, the GTC comprehensive hub, and the Chongqing-Kunming High-Speed Railway, making construction coordination highly challenging. Under the overall scheduling of the Kunming International Aviation Hub Engineering Construction Command, all participating units worked together, fully applying BIM technology for construction simulation to achieve millimeter-level precision control and efficiently ensure the smooth completion of the first lift.

The project adheres to the core planning concept of enhancing passenger travel experience and optimizing traffic efficiency, comprehensively upgrading the airport road access system and innovatively creating a multi-channel three-dimensional traffic mode. Passengers can reach the terminal departure level directly via airport ground ramps or rely on the under-construction Jibei Expressway for seamless connection and rapid airport access, effectively broadening travel routes and improving airport access efficiency. To address pain points such as traffic congestion and mixed traffic flows in front of the terminal, the project adopts a refined traffic organization scheme with independent diversion of domestic and international departure traffic flows, carrying out large-scale capacity expansion and upgrading of the lanes in front of the terminal. The international departure lanes will be expanded from 2 lanes to 6 lanes, and the domestic departure lanes from 3 lanes to 9 lanes, further alleviating problems such as concentrated traffic flow and traffic stagnation in front of the terminal, making passenger travel smoother and more relaxed.

At the same time, the project is supported by a complete dedicated access road network, with plans to build dedicated passages directly to the GTC comprehensive transportation center and parking buildings, as well as separate dedicated corridors for taxis and ride-hailing vehicles, comprehensively adapting to different travel scenarios and enriching diversified passenger transfer options. After the project is completed and put into use, it will comprehensively optimize the airport landside traffic network layout, achieve efficient gathering and distribution of people and vehicles, significantly enhance the airport's traffic capacity and convenience service quality, and create an efficient, convenient, and orderly travel environment for passengers.

The successful first lift of the steel box girder has accumulated mature practical experience for the subsequent batch lifting of 28,000 tons of steel box girders across 15 bridges, propelling the project's bridge construction onto the "fast track" of quality improvement and acceleration, and taking an important substantive step toward opening the key passage between the Jibei Expressway and the terminal area.

Source: Yunnan Aviation Industry Investment Group Co., Ltd.