King Abdulaziz International Airport

King Abdulaziz International Airport (IATA: JED), is located north of Jeddah City in Makkah al-Mukarramah Province. It is one of the major airports in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It receives 70 percent of the annual Hajj and Umrah pilgrims.

The new terminal, Terminal 1, at King Abdulaziz International Airport, occupies an area of 810,000 m and serves more than thirty million passengers annually. The airport boasts the world's second-tallest air traffic control tower, standing at a height of 136 m, and has forty-six gates for domestic and international flights, eight of which are dual-purpose. It also features ninety-four air bridges and provides parking spaces for over twenty-one thousand vehicles. The airport can accommodate 16,800 bags per hour on its conveyor belts.

The airport buildings are connected by a free internal transportation station, which is the Kingdom's first internal train station in airports. The airport management began operating it in 2020, and the train travels a route of one thousand m between points A and E. The internal train consists of ten cars with a capacity of ninety-six thousand passengers per day, and the transfer time between the two points is eighty-five seconds.

The train is equipped with all the services provided in the terminals of King Abdulaziz International Airport, including flight announcements, air conditioning, etc.

The first branch of King Abdulaziz International Airport was established in 1981 during the reign of King Khalid Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, becoming the second airport in Jeddah after the closure of its old airport. In 2019, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, inaugurated the new headquarters of the airport, which houses the fourth-largest passenger terminal in the world, covering an area of 510,000 m.

The design of the new King Abdulaziz International Airport reflects the identity of Jeddah as a coastal city stretching along the Red Sea. It features a massive glass aquarium situated in the center of the airport's terminals, connecting them together. The aquarium has a thickness of thirty cm, a height of fourteen m, a diameter of ten m, and weighs 120 thousand kg without its contents. It houses one million liters of seawater from the Red Sea and is home to two thousand marine organisms belonging to sixty-five different species native to the Red Sea. The aquarium also includes various coral reefs and is looked after and fed twice daily by a specialized diver. Surrounding the aquarium are twenty-six daylight and nighttime lighting fixtures, simulating natural daylight.