A guest blog from my father-in-law.
Yaksha Guarding the Airport at Arrival Wing
Yes, it was the awe striking sight of the Fabulous, Majestic, Wonderful Swarnabhumi Airport ! It seemed as if I have landed on some other planet. I was not walking , instead , the floor was moving , which carried me to the immigration point , about half a kilometer away from the landing point..
In the way, I was surprised to see the sheer beauty of this mag-nificent airport. Everything was so organized, tidy, disciplined and luxurious .
Designed by Helmut Jahn of Murphy Jahn Architects , and built at a cost of 155 billion THB (3.8 billion US $) Swarn-abhumi Airport is a marvel of Engineering and Architecture. It was named by H.M the King Bhumibol Adulyadej . Swarn-abhumi means the Land of Gold—what Thailand truly is. Coming pages of this blog will reveal how it is true !
Swarnabhumi Airport has the highest Airport Control Tower in the World. It is 132.2 M high. It has the World’s 3rd larg-est single building Airport Terminal, having an area of 5, 63,000 sq M There are two parallel 60 M wide runways of 4 km and 3.7 km length each, and two taxi ways. It has 120 parking bays – 51 with Contact gates and 69 with Remote Gates. It handles 76 Flights per hour, with annual passenger capacity crossing 45 million in addition to 3 MT of Cargo. The Five storied Car park buildings has a parking capacity of 5000 cars at a time.
Other facilities worth mentioning are-107 moving walkways, 102 elevators, 22 baggage conveyor belts, 130 passport control checkpoints for arrivals, 72 for departures, 26 customs control checkpoints for arrivals, 8 for departures, 360 check-in counters. There are 100 additional counters for pas-sengers without luggage, and 83 escalators. etc. Airport staff and officers are ever ready to help you !
The Airport is situated at about 25 km east of Bangkok City and is well connected by modern motorway. There are Re-gional Train services, Sky Train Service (BTS), City Bus service, Public taxis and flat fare Limousine car service etc, which offer excellent service to Airport bound passengers.
On the terminal, there are hundreds of show rooms of world renowned brands of nearly all kinds of consumer goods in-cluding cosmetics and jewelry, duty-free shops, and food counters for the convenience of the passengers
Vishnu Sharma 