Thirty-one miles of driverless track inside one airport. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries announced on August 20 that it has won the automated people mover contract for the first phase of Al Maktoum International Airport in Dubai, a system MHI describes as the largest airport APM ever built.
What the Al Maktoum People Mover Involves
The award came from Dubai Aviation City Corporation, a Dubai government entity, to a three-party consortium: MHI, its Dubai-based subsidiary MHI Mobility Engineering Services, and Larsen & Toubro of India. The system covers roughly 50 kilometers, links nine stations and operates 165 automated vehicles.
The work splits along a familiar line. MHI and MHI-MESC lead design, procurement and testing of the vehicles and the signaling system, and own system integration. L&T designs, procures, tests and constructs everything else on site, which in an APM of this length means guideway, stations, maintenance facilities and the civil works underneath all of it. Completion is scheduled for December 2031. MHI did not disclose what the contract is worth.
Scale, and What It Is a Piece Of
The APM is one component of the Al Maktoum expansion, a development that ENR has reported at roughly $35 billion across about 27 square miles, intended eventually to replace Dubai International as the emirate’s main hub with capacity for 260 million passengers a year. Those program-level figures come from ENR’s coverage rather than from Monday’s announcement, and they’re worth holding loosely; airport programs of this size get rescoped.
The people mover is not a side item in a program like this. At 27 square miles, the airport is physically too large to walk, and every gate’s usability depends on the APM’s headway. Airports have learned this expensively. If the train doesn’t run at design frequency, remote concourses become unusable and the terminal capacity you paid for doesn’t exist.
Why 50 Kilometers Changes the Engineering
Most airport people movers run two to eight kilometers on a shuttle or pinched-loop configuration with a handful of vehicles. A 50-kilometer network with nine stations and 165 vehicles is a different class of system, closer in operational terms to a light metro than to an inter-terminal shuttle. That means real network signaling with moving-block control, a maintenance and storage facility sized for a fleet, and a systems-integration risk profile that dwarfs the civil work.
Six years from award to completion is tight for that. The long pole is almost always integration and testing, not guideway construction, and the commissioning window is where these programs slip.
U.S. terminal programs are wrestling with smaller versions of the same problem: circulation and phasing decide whether new gates function, which is the central constraint on jobs like the $2.55 billion Terminal B rebuild at Houston Intercontinental. Dubai’s answer is to build the circulation system at metro scale first. No U.S. firm appears in the consortium.