Lhasa Gonggar International Airport

Building an airport in Tibet, which is termed in flying parlance as going over a "hump" in the Tibetan Plateau, has gone through a process of trial and error through many hazardous air routes and several fatal accidents during World War II. Damxung Airport The first airport began construction in 1955 and was completed in May 1956, across river from Gongtang township in the southwest of Damxung County at a height of . Due to remoteness this airport was serviced by a gravel runway but needed constant maintenance due to high winds blowing away the stones. Flights were sparse with a limited daily window in the morning, departure before afternoon to avoid high winds and eventually limited to flights to one per month or one month and a half. There was no terminal building (added later with two aprons on the southwest end) and staff lived in a small building on site. An Ilyushin Il-12 and a Convair CV-240-401 were the first aircraft that landed at Damxung airport from the north and south. They thus broke the jinx of the "forbidden air zone", and this was acclaimed a feat. It took almost nine more years before the first Beijing-Chengdu-Lhasa air route became operational in 1965. Gonggar Airport In 1965, the Gonggar Airport was constructed to provide a more reliable location. Damxung Airport was decommissioned subsequently (site partially converted into a race course with footprint of runway visible from satellite views) and the Lhasa Aviation Office was moved from Damxung to Gonggar Airport. This established the Gonngar Airport as the second airport in Tibet. Over the years, with more expansion of the facilities, Gonggar became the domestic hub in the Tibetan Plateau connecting many other airports in Tibet. In 2021, Terminal 3 was put into service. It occupies a floor area of 88,000 m2 and has 21 extra gates for boarding and deplaning, enabling the airport to serve 9 million passengers per year by 2025. The new terminal has a lotus-shaped roof and rich Tibetan style architecture, paying homage to Tibetan culture and ethnic identity. ==Geographic environment==

Gonggar Airport is in Gyazuling township of the Gonggar County. It is built in the county where Yarlung Tsangpo River (the Brahmaputra River) is very wide on the right bank (southern bank) of the river providing facilities for the runways. It is for this reason that the airport was constructed at this location, though away from Lhasa where space was a limitation. The airport lies to the west of Rawa-me, which is the capital of the county, at the entry of the Namrab Valley, from Tsetang. Within a radius of the airport is surrounded by mountains with elevations ranging from . Access to the airport from Lhasa has been further facilitated by constructing a road tunnel, which has reduced the distance and time taken to reach the airport from Lhasa by 40 minutes; time of travel from Lhasa is now about 40–60 minutes by shuttle bus services. ==Airport description==

At an elevation of above sea level, the airport is one of the highest in the world. Its runway, with airport rank 4E, at with a width of , is designed to handle wide-bodied aircraft in the thin Tibetan air. It has an area of with the passenger handling facilities of ticketing office, the baggage collection beltways and visitors gallery on the first floor of the new terminal building, and the departure lounge on the second floor with shopping malls, kiosks and restaurants. There are four aero bridges (one two-way bridge and three single-way bridges) to facilitate passengers to board and disembark from the aircraft. Prior to the completion of the larger Terminal 3 in 2021, the airport only had parking facilities for five Airbus A340 or seven Boeing 757 aircraft. ==Flight handling==

Flights to and from Lhasa Gonggar Airport are handled by a number of domestic airlines including Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, Shenzhen, Hainan, Sichuan, and Tibet Airlines, and one foreign airline, the Nepal-based Himalaya Airlines. It is typically not possible to purchase air tickets directly from these carriers given the requirement of obtaining the necessary governmental travel permit, which is not the same as the visa to gain entry into the rest of mainland China. Given the frequency of strong air currents picking up in the afternoon, most flights into the airport are scheduled in the morning. The night landing facility was commissioned on 14 November 2007 with the landing of an Airbus A319 aircraft of Air China carrying 90 passengers. This facility was made operational initially once a week on Wednesdays from Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in Sichuan Province. With this facility the airport planned to handle 1.1 million passengers every year by 2010, as against 1.005 million in 2007. The airport was able to accommodate an Airbus A330 overnight for the first time on April 11, 2017, a problem due to the airport's high altitude. ==Infrastructure==

A new highway between Lhasa and the Gonggar Airport has been built by the Transportation Department of Tibet at a cost of RMB 1.5 billion yuan. It is a four-lane road of length. This road is part of the National Highway 318; it starts from the Lhasa railway station, passes through the Caina Township in Qushui County, terminates between the north entrance of the Gala Mountain Tunnel and the south bridge head of Lhasa River Bridge, and en route goes over the first overpass of Lhasa at Liuwu Overpass. ==Airlines and destinations==