Changi Airport Group (CAG) has announced that the new Terminal 4 (T4) facility at Changi Airport in Singapore is scheduled to commence operations on October 31, 2017. This follows the recent successful conclusion of major trials, with a small number of checks and reviews to be completed in the final phase of the preparations.
To ensure a smooth transition of flight operations from the existing terminals, the operations of the nine T4 airlines – the AirAsia Group (four airlines), Cathay Pacific Airways, Cebu Pacific Air, Korean Air, Spring Airlines and Vietnam Airlines – will all be shifted to T4 in the space of a week.
The first arrival and departing flights at T4 will be operated by Cathay Pacific, flying to and from Hong Kong. Since October 2016, CAG has collaborated with its airport partners to prepare T4 for flight operations. This began with table-top exercises to develop the standard operating procedures, and later progressed to ground deployment exercises to familiarize staff with the new terminal and processes.
Volunteers from the airport community and members of the public were invited to role-play as passengers to test the critical airport systems and processes. These included the Fast And Seamless Travel (FAST) self-service options at check-in, bag drop, immigration and boarding, as well as security screening, baggage handling, flight information, ground transport, wayfinding, and transfer processes.
In recent weeks, CAG conducted trials involving selected commercial flights with airline partners at T4, which were essential to validate the interoperability and process integration of the airport and airline systems. Altogether, more than 100 trials have been conducted, involving over 1,500 volunteer participants and 2,500 airport staff.
Tan Lye Teck, executive vice president (airport management), CAG, said, “The past months have been a very crucial period for us as we conducted intensive tests and trials, not only to ensure that the systems work well, but also to understand how passengers navigate the new terminal, including interacting with initiatives such as FAST which may be less familiar to them.
“We have identified areas of improvement following those trials. Feedback gathered from trial participants has also been very useful to CAG and our partners in finetuning our systems and processes. We will take the next few weeks to complete the last set of trials as we prepare for the commencement of operations at T4.”
T4 will add a capacity of 16 million passengers per annum to Changi Airport, bringing the airport’s total annual handling capacity to 82 million passenger movements.