International flights to only gradually shift from HCMC to mega Long Thanh airport

After its opening next year, authorities will not move all international flights to Long Thanh International Airport from Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhat and instead wait on connecting transport infrastructure.

According to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV), it has submitted its plan for distributing flight operations between Tan Son Nhat and Long Thanh airports to the Ministry of Construction after weighing two proposals from the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV), the operator of all 22 of 23 civil airports in Vietnam.

Under one, Long Thanh will handle all international flights and Tan Son Nhat, which is 40 km away, will serve domestic routes, and under the other they share international services.

Given that the transport infrastructure connecting Long Thanh is incomplete, the CAAV said it supports the second option.

This flexible approach means a two-phase roadmap for the transition.

During the 2025–30 period they will share international routes, but no new international services to Ho Chi Minh City or expansion will be licensed.

Airlines wishing to move to Long Thanh during this period will be allowed to do so.

The transition will dovetail with the new airport’s construction progress, operational readiness and transport connectivity.

From the summer of 2026 airlines will be encouraged to move long-haul services to Europe, the Americas and Oceania to Long Thanh.

It will gradually expand to accommodate flights to Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Until then Tan Son Nhat will continue to host short-haul international services of up to 1,000 km operated by all Vietnamese carriers and most domestic flights, while Long Thanh will only host a part of domestic services.

After 2030, once the transport infrastructure around Long Thanh is fully ready, all international services will move there.

The airport is expected to become a major aviation hub, integrating an airport city, a free-trade commercial zone and connections to expressways and metro lines like in Singapore and Amsterdam.

Tan Son Nhat will then host only domestic routes and irregular and international chartered services serving organizations or individuals.

Long Thanh airport spans 5,000 hectares and will cost nearly VND336.63 trillion (US$13.2 billion) to build.

Classified as a key national project, it will replace Tan Son Nhat as the biggest airport in the country once completed.

Following its first phase, to be completed by the end of this year, it will have a capacity of 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of cargo annually.

Calibration flights to the airport were conducted last Friday.

Over the next month experts from the Air Traffic Management Technical Company and the Czech Republic’s Air Navigation Institute will conduct a battery of tests on the runway’s precision landing systems, navigation beacons, radar, ADS-B technology, and lighting.

By Giang Anh – VnExpress.net – September 29, 2025