After three years of construction, Terminal 3 of the Lhasa Gonggar Airport in the Tibet autonomous region is expected to begin operating on Saturday, the Tibet Bureau of the Civil Aviation Administration of China said on Tuesday.

Lhasa Gonggar Airport is the largest aviation hub in Tibet and the largest high-plateau airport in the region. Expanding T3 was a key project of the region during the 13th Five-Year Plan period (2016-20).

Tibet first got flight service in 1965 and has achieved a notable safety and air defense record in the past 56 years. The airport has the longest safety record in the plateau region, which has the highest average altitude and some of the most difficult flight conditions in the world.

With an investment of more than 3.9 billion yuan ($603 million), the airport project included a new 88,000-square-meter terminal and an apron with 21 aircraft docks, the bureau said.

Xie Wenming, chief engineer in the construction project management center of the Tibet Branch of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, said that after the facility’s full completion, the airport will move promptly toward its annual goal of 9 million passenger visits and 80,000 metric tons of cargo.

The airport has enabled flight connections with 62 cities and 114 routes. Annual passenger throughput exceeded 4.5 million in 2019.

The current Terminal 2 of Lhasa Gonggar Airport was officially put into use in 2004, handling 1 million passenger visits annually, or 1,300 passenger visits per hour at peak times. It exceeded 4.5 million passenger visits in 2019 for the first time,” Xie said.

“The number of annual passenger visits has exceeded the designed capacity of the terminal, which has restricted the development of the region’s civil aviation transportation.”

The new T3 will address that, he added.