DXB’s Terminal 1 reopens, welcomes first passengers in 15 months

Dubai International’s (DXB) Terminal 1 and Concourse D welcomed their first passengers on Thursday, June 24, with the arrival of flynas flight XY201 from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Linked to Terminal 1 by an airport train, the $1.2bn Concourse D, opened in February 2016 as the home terminal for DXB’s 65 plus international carriers. The reopening of the facility will see the phased return of these carriers from Terminals 2 and 3, as the hub prepares for an increase in traffic in the upcoming months. The facility serves more than 18 million passengers annually.

The facilities were closed on March 25, 2020, following the partial suspension of operations at DXB as part of the measures to control the spread of Covid-19.

Dubai Airports’ fast-track passport control service, that deploys face and iris-recognition technologies, has reduced the time to complete passport control formalities to between 5-9 seconds.

Read: Passport control at Dubai Airports can now be completed in 9 seconds

On June 22, one of the world’s largest Covid-19 RT-PCR testing laboratories was officially opened at DXB. Located close to Terminal 2, the 20,000 square-foot laboratory is a dedicated facility for round the clock processing of RT-PCR test samples collected from passengers at the airport.

Read: New Covid-19 lab at Dubai airport can process 100,000 samples daily