New airport approved in autonomous region

China's top economic planner approved a new airport project worth 760 million yuan ($110 million) in Yutian, a remote county in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

"The construction of the airport, in line with the region's air transport development, will improve its emergency rescue ability, promote local social and economic growth and boost the development of tourist resources," the National Development and Reform Commission said on Monday in a statement on its website.

The central government will allocate 228 million yuan to the project, and the Civil Aviation Development Fund will invest 380 million yuan. The regional government will contribute the remaining 152 million yuan, according to the statement.

The airport is designed to handle 180,000 passenger trips and 400 metric tons of cargo annually. It will feature a 3,200-meter runway and a 3,000-square-meter terminal building.

Yutian county, on the southern edge of the Taklimakan Desert, is 1,300 kilometers southwest of the regional capital Urumqi.

Home to dozens of ethnic groups, Xinjiang has 21 civil airports, the most among provincial regions on the Chinese mainland. These airports handled 30 million passengers last year. But experts said that airport density is still low in Xinjiang since it covers about one-sixth of China's territory.

Li Xiaojin, a professor of aviation economics at the Civil Aviation University of China in Tianjin, said that Xinjiang covers an area of over 1.6 million square kilometers with complicated geological conditions, resulting in high costs for road and railway construction, let alone high-speed railway. Comparatively speaking, building airports is more budget friendly.

"Xinjiang has unique and rich tourism resources, but the region is far from its market in the eastern region, which can't be solved by building more highways or railways. Instead, it has a strong need for the civil aviation industry and needs more airports to boost local tourism," he added.

Besides the Yutian airport, the region will continue preliminary work on eight other airports this year.