Vietnam's biggest aviation project finally has a start date. Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) has told Dong Nai provincial authorities that Long Thanh International Airport will begin commercial operations at 0:00 on December 24, 2026, giving line agencies a fixed benchmark to coordinate everything from firefighting readiness to air traffic control in the run-up to opening.

The scale is hard to overstate. The airport covers roughly 5,000 hectares in Dong Nai province, outside Ho Chi Minh City, with total investment projected above 16 billion US dollars — about 416 trillion Vietnamese dong — spread over three phases. Phase one alone costs more than 5.4 billion dollars and is designed to handle 25 million passengers and 1.2 million tonnes of cargo a year. When all three phases are complete, capacity rises to 100 million passengers and 5 million tonnes of freight annually, putting Long Thanh in the conversation for Southeast Asia's major international transit hubs.

The physical infrastructure matches the ambition. The centrepiece is a 4,000-metre runway built to take the largest passenger aircraft flying today, including the Airbus A380 and Boeing 747-8 — a clear signal that Vietnam wants long-haul intercontinental routes routed through Long Thanh. Runways, taxiways, aprons, navigation aids, terminals, fuel supply, security systems and the control tower are all in the final completion stage after more than five years of construction.

Early operations will be modest relative to the design capacity: a maximum of around 366 flights per week, of which 322 are domestic and 44 international. ACV is also working on the ground-transport side, proposing priority lanes at key intersections for dedicated airport express buses and shuttle services linking Long Thanh with Ho Chi Minh City's existing Tan Son Nhat airport. Longer term, the plan is a multimodal network of buses, coaches, inter-airport transit and future urban rail connections tying the two airports and regional hubs together.

For travellers, this matters most if you're flying into or out of Ho Chi Minh City. Tan Son Nhat has been operating well beyond comfortable capacity for years, and Long Thanh is intended to absorb that pressure — eventually taking over much of the international traffic. In the first months expect a limited route network and a work-in-progress atmosphere, but also a brand-new terminal and shorter queues. If your trip to southern Vietnam falls in late December 2026 or 2027, it's worth checking whether your airline shifts operations to Long Thanh, and how the airport transfers are set up before you book.

Details come from Vietnam Insider.