Project Description

Ezhou SF Super Cargo Hub Airport

Client: Ezhou SF Super Cargo Hub Airport

In the solicitation of international schemes of Ezhou SF freight hub design in 2018, Landrum & Brown and the Central South Architectural Design Institute, Vanderland, and the China Academy of Building Research formed a consortium to participate in this program. After expert review, the scheme was selected as the final implementation of the expansion project. The SF Super Hub project was settled in Ezhou, aiming to build an international express transfer center and develop an express hub route network. It strives to cover 90% of regions and cities in China within a 1.5-hour flight and realize the development strategy of time-sensitive products such as “Next Morning Delivery”, aiming to build Asia’s largest and the world’s fourth-largest aviation logistics hub. Ezhou Airport is located at Ezhou, a suburb of Wuhan, in the geographical center of China.

The short-term planned SF Express Center is about 680,000 square meters, the service cargo and mail handling capacity are over 2.7 million tons in 2025, and the long-term SF Express Center will be expanded to 1.17 million square meters. Service cargo and mail processing capacity will reach over 7.7 million tons. It will be one of the busiest cargo airports in the world.

In order to serve SF’s time-sensitive product strategy and build an international cargo hub, the biggest challenge of this project is how to combine the organic elements including the airfield runway & taxiway system, transfer center configuration and architectural scheme, stand layout, automatic sorting system, logistics process, etc. to render Ezhou airport and SF express center meet the strategic development requirements of full-timeliness and full-cost express delivery products.

L&B was responsible for the master planning and design, providing terminal configuration, gate planning, and layout design for such large aviation cargo hubs. As this project leads the reform of China’s air express delivery industry, it explores and innovates based on the comprehensive case of UPS Louisville Airport and FedEx Memphis Airport.

Since October 2016, the L&B Shanghai office has made great efforts, including holding several internal technical workshops and developing more than 20 program options. The winning proposal provides the most efficient operation cycle time and costs over the entire life cycle, and these are the two highlights that SF Express values most.

Other related tasks include: