About Doha
Hamad International Airport is the international airport for Doha, the capital of Qatar. Opened in 2014 to replace the old Doha International Airport, it serves as the home base for Qatar Airways. It was built on reclaimed land from the Persian Gulf and is designed to handle the Airbus A380 superjumbo.
The airport is recognized for its luxury and art installations, most notably the giant "Lamp Bear" by Urs Fischer in the center of the terminal. The architecture features undulating roofs resembling ocean waves. It includes high-end shopping, a hotel, and wellness centers inside the transit area.
It has rapidly established itself as a major global transit hub, connecting East and West. The airport features two parallel runways, one of which is 4,850 meters long, one of the longest in the world. The expansion plans include a tropical garden similar to Singapore's Changi, aiming to enhance the passenger experience further.
Hamad International rose from the seabed as an ambitious Qatari sovereign project after Doha International proved incapable of handling the surge in Qatar Airways' fleet in the mid-2000s. Construction consumed 22 million cubic metres of dredged sand pumped from offshore banks and used to raise the site five metres above the mean high-tide mark, in defiance of the low-lying Persian Gulf coastline. The airport's ground-handling contract, the largest single procurement in Qatari history at 2.1 billion US dollars for a ten-year term, was awarded to the ground-handling arm of Qatar Airways itself under a controversial no-tender basis that briefly drew ICAO scrutiny. Its ICAO code OTHH replaced the old Doha International's OTBD in April 2014 during a single overnight cutover that involved physically moving 234 aircraft between the two sites during a scheduled ten-hour closure of Qatari airspace.