Rise above the red earth east of Ho Chi Minh City and a vast lotus flower seems to bloom out of the construction dust. It is not a sculpture. It is the roof of Long Thanh International Airport — Vietnam’s roughly US$16 billion bet on becoming one of Southeast Asia’s great aviation hubs.

The airport held a ceremonial “technical opening” with its first flights on 19 December 2025, and is due to open to fare-paying passengers in mid-2026. The headline number is the size — a terminal built to handle 25 million passengers a year in its first phase, scaling to 100 million. But the more remarkable number is the calendar.

Vietnam’s government formally approved construction on 4 January 2021. Roughly five years later, the airport is flying. For a greenfield mega-hub, that is astonishingly fast — and it is thrown into sharp relief by what happened the last time a wealthy country tried to build a flagship airport from scratch.

A Lotus the Size of a District

The terminal’s shape is no accident: the lotus is Vietnam’s national flower, and Heerim Architects wrapped a 376,000-square-metre building around the motif, its roof peaking at more than 45 metres. Phase one is designed for 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo a year — and that is only the opening act. The full plan calls for four terminals and a capacity of 100 million passengers, which would put Long Thanh among the largest airports on Earth.

It exists for a simple reason: Tan Son Nhat, the airport that currently serves Ho Chi Minh City, is hemmed in by the city around it and has been bursting at the seams for years. Long Thanh is the relief valve — and the statement of ambition.

Now Compare Berlin

To appreciate how quickly Vietnam moved, set Long Thanh beside the most infamous airport project of the modern era: Berlin Brandenburg, known by its code BER.

Germany — Europe’s richest economy, a byword for engineering — broke ground on BER in 2006 and scheduled the grand opening for October 2011. Then it all came apart. Weeks before the launch, the fire-protection and smoke-extraction system failed inspection. What followed was nearly a decade of dysfunction: kilometres of incorrectly installed cabling, thousands of wrongly wired components, and a management saga so embarrassing it became a national punchline. BER finally opened on 31 October 2020 — roughly nine years late, with costs ballooning from an estimated €2 billion to around €7 billion.

The contrast is stark. In roughly the same span of time that Berlin spent simply being late, Vietnam approved, financed, built and opened a larger airport on a greenfield site — and made it look like a national celebration rather than a national embarrassment.

Why It Matters

Long Thanh is more than a building. It is a marker of how the centre of gravity in global aviation infrastructure has shifted east, where fast-growing economies are throwing up mega-hubs at a pace that older aviation powers can no longer match. When the first scheduled passengers walk beneath that lotus roof in 2026, they will be standing inside a five-year project that quietly outbuilt one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Sources: Airports Corporation of Vietnam; VnExpress; VietnamNet; Wikipedia (Long Thanh International Airport; Berlin Brandenburg Airport); Vietnamese government press releases.