Pamela Chow, Singapore, July 26, 2017
Changi Airport yesterday unveiled its soon-to-open Terminal 4 (T4) during a special media preview, highlighting how the extensive use of technology and automation will take centre stage at this new facility.
The new two-storey terminal is equipped with the end-to-end Fast and Seamless Travel (FAST) for departing passengers. This includes automated check-in kiosks, baggage drop using facial recognition and Xbox Kinect-powered 3D modelling technology, as well as immigration and boarding gates that share facial and thumbprint biometric data.
Passenger clearing immigration using the AIG
This fully automated process is expected to yield some 20 per cent manpower savings in the long term. The terminal also holds three rows of conventional check-in counters for airlines not yet equipped for automated check-in. It will have centralised areas for departure and arrival immigration as well as pre-board security screening.
Poised to receive 16 million passengers a year, T4 will have a capacity two-thirds that of Terminal 3 and will raise Changi Airport's total annual capacity to 82 million, said Poh Li San, vice president of T4 programme management office at Changi Airport Group.
Nine airlines are set to operate in T4: four under the AirAsia Group, as well as Cathay Pacific, Cebu Pacific, Korean Air, Spring Airlines and Vietnam Airlines. These serve an estimated eight million passengers in Changi Airport each year.
Of these airlines, LCCs are most ready to adapt fully automated check-in systems, said Ivan Tan, senior vice president of corporate and marketing communications at Changi Airport Group.
Two lounges - Cathay Pacific’s First and Business Class Lounge and Blossom Lounge, a pay-per-use lounge managed by SATS and Plaza Premium, are located at level 2M within the transit area.
With a total floor area of 225,000m2, T4 also boasts more than 2,000m2 of landscaped interiors, immersive LED displays, internationally commissioned installations, 80 retail and F&B outlets, and a Heritage Zone in the transit area with local food offerings.
Located two kilometres from the existing three terminals, T4 will be connected to Terminal 2 by shuttle buses that operate at 10-minutes intervals round the clock.
Currently in the final stage of operational readiness trials, T4 is expected to begin operations later this year. It will be open to public visits from August 7-20, for which all 200,000 tickets have been snapped up.
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