HANOI, Nov. 24 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam's top legislature on Friday decided to spend over 1 billion U.S. dollars on site clearance for construction of Long Thanh international airport in southern Dong Nai province.
According to a resolution adopted by the National Assembly on Friday, the last day of the legislature's 4th session, Vietnam will, from now to 2019, recover nearly 5,400 hectares of land to build the airport.
A total of 22,938 billion Vietnamese dong (over 1 billion U.S. dollars) will be spent on compensating households that have to relocate and on resettling them.
The airport will be designed to serve 100 million passengers annually and handle 5 million tons of cargo.
The airport's construction will have three phases, with the first phase costing 5.45 billion U.S. dollars, excluding the site clearance expense.
The first phase is scheduled to be completed in 2025 when a runway and a terminal become operational, serving 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of cargo a year.
Vietnam's aviation sector served 38.3 million passengers in the first 10 months of this year, up 11.4 percent year-on-year, said the country's General Statistics Office. Meanwhile, the sector transported 262,100 tons of cargo, up 8.8 percent than the same period last year.
