With a Boeing 737 passenger plane taking off from Tangshan airfield and station of an air base under the air force of the Beijing Military Area Command (MAC) of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and flying to Guangzhou, capital city of south China's Guangdong province, at 9:00 a.m. on July 13, the Tangshan military-civil airport has been successfully opened.

Approved by the Civil Aviation Administration of China, this airport was named as the Tangshan Sannvhe Airport. It is situated in Fengrun District of Tangshan in Hebei province, 20km away from the downtown of Tangshan. It is airworthy mainly for Boeing 737 aircraft and Airbus 320 family aircraft. It is planned to have a passenger handling capacity of around 100,000 persons/times in 2010 and the number of passengers will reach 500,000 persons/times by 2015.

It is said that in order not to affect the generation of combat effectiveness, a series of norms enjoying priorities by military training were clearly incorporated into the Military-civil Airport Management Agreement after repeated consultations, including that civil flight should yield to the flights of combat missions, special planes, and emergency tasks and the maximum flights should be confined to 20 sorties every day.

Zhao Yong, secretary of the Tangshan Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China, told the reporters that the successful opening of the Sannvhe military-civil airport filled in the gap of Tangshan's land, sea and air traffic network, erecting a bridge between Tangshan and the rest of the world.

By Zou Weirong and Yang Hong

Source: PLA Daily