Gadeok’s Future Depends on the Network Busan Builds

Gadeok is now targeted to open in the second half of 2035 with a 3,500-meter runway, round-the-clock operating capability and new rail connections extending beyond Busan, but whether the airport becomes more than a larger international gateway will depend on the routes, aircraft, passenger behavior and connecting traffic that take shape long before opening day.

Busan’s next airport remains roughly nine years away, while the aviation market it is intended to serve is already changing at a pace that makes the intervening period part of the airport story rather than a prelude to it. In the first half of 2026, the city received 2.42 million foreign visitors, 43.9 percent more than a year earlier, while international passenger traffic at Gimhae International Airport reached about 6.07 million, the highest first-half total in the airport’s history. Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan and China accounted for most of those international passengers, sustaining a dense short- and medium-haul market that has developed around the economics of low-cost carriers and the geography of a city positioned within a few hours of many of East Asia’s largest travel markets.

By the time Gadeok reaches its current target of opening in the second half of 2035, that market will have spent almost another decade developing without the airport that is eventually meant to accommodate it. Airlines will have made repeated decisions over where to base aircraft and add capacity; passengers will have become accustomed to particular gateways, fares and transfer patterns; new international routes will either have established durable markets or disappeared; and South Korea’s low-cost airline industry will have been reorganized through the planned integration of Jin Air, Air Busan and Air Seoul. Rail projects intended to connect Gadeok with Busan, Ulsan and parts of South Gyeongsang will likewise have progressed from engineering and feasibility studies toward operating services whose frequencies and hours, rather than the presence of tracks alone, will determine their value to airline passengers.

Gadeok is being designed with capabilities that Gimhae cannot readily reproduce, including a 3,500-meter runway, the ability to support round-the-clock operations and a double-track airport railway intended to connect the terminal with a broader regional transport system. The airport plan forecasts 23.26 million international passengers and approximately 335,000 tons of international air cargo in 2065, while the initial operating direction remains centered on international flights, with the detailed division of airport functions to be settled before opening. These investments enlarge the range of operations that can physically be conducted from Busan, but they cannot determine which airlines will assign aircraft there, which routes will operate often enough to become useful, or whether travelers in surrounding cities will choose Gadeok over other airports.

Busan is not replacing an airport that failed to generate demand. Much of the pressure now placed on Gimhae is the consequence of a market that succeeded: high-frequency Asian services and strong origin-and-destination traffic have produced an international gateway whose growth has been driven primarily by passengers beginning or ending their journey in the region rather than by large volumes of connecting traffic. The next stage of development therefore requires more than transferring those passengers to a larger site or attaching several distant cities to the route map. Busan must preserve the parts of the existing market that work, identify new routes capable of becoming commercially durable, keep the future airport competitive for passengers who already find Gimhae convenient, and determine whether the airline and transport systems surrounding Gadeok can support an operating role broader than that of a larger international gateway.

A Market That Worked

Gimhae’s international growth is often presented as self-evident proof that Busan requires a larger airport, but the more useful analysis begins earlier, with the market conditions that allowed the existing airport to grow. Gadeok will inherit the consequences of that development rather than begin with a new aviation economy, making the structure of present demand as important as the limits of the facilities now processing it.

Busan’s location provides much of the explanation. The city lies within relatively short flying distance of several of East Asia’s largest tourism and travel markets, allowing airlines to serve Japan, Taiwan, eastern China and much of Southeast Asia with narrow-body aircraft while maintaining comparatively high frequencies. Those distances fit the economics of low-cost carriers particularly well because aircraft can complete multiple rotations and large volumes of leisure and independent travel can support point-to-point operations without the connecting traffic on which large intercontinental hubs depend. Busan provides a substantial outbound market of its own, while the growth of international tourism increasingly supplies traffic in the opposite direction.

The composition of Gimhae’s traffic makes the model unusually visible. Of the roughly 6.07 million international passengers recorded during the first half of 2026, about 2.59 million traveled on Japanese routes, 1.03 million on Vietnamese routes, 946,000 on Taiwanese routes and 599,000 on Chinese routes, putting the four markets at roughly 85 percent of the total. Such concentration appears limiting if airport development is judged primarily by the geographic breadth of a route map, but it also demonstrates how effectively Gimhae has built demand around destinations that can be served frequently with the aircraft types most commonly deployed by Korean and foreign low-cost carriers.

Rising passenger volume should not be mistaken for evidence that Gimhae has already developed the passenger geography of a hub. The 2024 national air-passenger movement survey found that 79.4 percent of surveyed Gimhae passengers had made their final pre-airport journey from Busan, compared with 11.1 percent from South Gyeongsang and 4.6 percent from Ulsan; within Busan, Haeundae accounted for 14.2 percent of origins and Busanjin for 13.7 percent. Taxi and private car together represented almost two-thirds of airport access, while subway and light rail accounted for 25.8 percent, and the reported average journey from origin to the airport was 45.7 minutes.

The observed market is therefore considerably more concentrated than descriptions of a single Busan-Ulsan-Gyeongnam catchment often imply. Gimhae has spent decades becoming familiar to a heavily Busan-centered passenger base, supported by transport networks and travel routines that already influence where residents begin an international journey. Gadeok will have to reproduce enough of that convenience for the existing market even as policymakers seek to extend its reach toward populations that have historically supplied a much smaller share of Gimhae’s passengers.

The planning problem is consequently more complicated than insufficient terminal space or runway capacity. Gimhae demonstrates that a large international market can develop outside Seoul when geography, airline economics and local demand reinforce one another, but the network produced by those conditions remains overwhelmingly Asian, point-to-point and dependent on narrow-body operations. Busan’s next stage of aviation growth will depend on preserving the density that made the existing market successful while identifying where that model can continue to expand and where a different network structure becomes economically necessary.

The Next Passenger Is Harder to Find

Busan’s tourism growth appears to provide a large reservoir of passengers for additional international service. Of the 2.42 million foreign visitors recorded in the first half of 2026, 1.01 million, or 41.9 percent, arrived through Gimhae Airport and another 377,800, or 15.6 percent, came through Busan Port; 1.03 million, representing 42.5 percent of the total, reached Busan after entering Korea elsewhere.

More than a million foreign visitors therefore came to the city without using Gimhae as their international gateway, although the commercial meaning of that figure is far less straightforward than its size suggests. Some visitors deliberately combine Seoul and Busan in one itinerary, while others enter through the airport that best matches their origin market, preferred carrier, schedule or fare before continuing south by rail or road. Others travel through several Korean destinations rather than treating Busan as the sole purpose of the trip. Additional nonstop service could capture a portion of that traffic as the city’s inbound market grows, but the number of passengers who would actually change their airport choice cannot be obtained by subtracting Gimhae arrivals from the total number of foreign visitors.

Another indicator provides clearer evidence that Busan contains substantial demand for journeys beyond the reach of its current network. Close to 450,000 passengers used the Gimhae-Incheon international-transfer feeder service in 2025, and its weekly frequency was subsequently increased from 35 to 39 flights. The service exists precisely because passengers originating around Busan need international connections available at Incheon, yet its volume should not be interpreted as demand for any single Busan long-haul route because those travelers disperse across the much larger set of destinations served through Korea’s primary hub.

Their significance lies in demonstrating the economic function of a hub. When no single origin can sustain frequent flights to dozens of distant cities, a hub combines passengers traveling to different destinations into larger traffic pools and redistributes them across its network. Busan may therefore generate hundreds of thousands of long-distance journeys while still lacking enough demand between Busan and an individual city in Europe or North America to support a frequent wide-body service.

Long-haul economics also depend on variables that aggregate passenger totals cannot reveal. Premium and business demand influence yield, belly cargo can improve route economics, long-range aircraft and crews are scarce assets, and enough traffic generally has to exist in both directions. A nonstop flight operating once or twice a week may be attractive to travelers whose schedules happen to fit it while remaining materially less useful to much of the market than a daily one-stop itinerary through a well-coordinated hub.

Busan’s strategic objective should therefore not be framed as reclaiming passengers supposedly lost to Incheon, because some connecting travel will remain commercially rational even after Gadeok opens. The more useful distinction lies between markets whose demand is becoming sufficiently concentrated to support direct service and markets whose passengers remain too dispersed but could be served more efficiently through a smaller number of routes into powerful connecting systems. Once demand is viewed in those terms, the route strategy becomes a question of network function rather than distance alone.

A Network, Not a Long-Haul Wish List

The most visible measure of an airport’s international ambition is often the list of distant cities on its departure board, which helps explain why Los Angeles, major European capitals and other intercontinental destinations regularly occupy the center of discussions about Busan’s aviation future. Nonstop long-haul service carries obvious symbolic value because it allows a city to reach markets that would otherwise require passage through Seoul or another hub, but the economic contribution of a route depends less on the distance flown than on the traffic it can organize, the frequency it can sustain and the onward journeys it makes possible.

Busan’s existing advantage rests first on density. Japan, Taiwan, China and Southeast Asia provide markets close enough to support narrow-body operations and comparatively frequent schedules, and frequency is itself a component of connectivity. A twice-daily service provides more than additional seat volume over a twice-weekly route: it widens the choice of departure times, supports shorter trips, improves recovery from disruption and allows airlines to combine leisure and higher-yield demand across a more useful schedule. A strategy that weakens such density in pursuit of several prestigious but infrequent long-haul services could produce a route map that looks geographically broader while making the network less useful to many of the passengers who currently sustain it.

Medium-haul expansion represents a second and economically distinct layer. Improvements in narrow-body range have pushed the commercially plausible boundary of Busan’s network farther outward without immediately requiring the cost structure of conventional intercontinental wide-body service. Bali offers a useful example. Air Busan launched the route in October 2024 and carried about 67,000 passengers on roughly 400 flights during its first year, with load factors above 80 percent during the summer peak. The result does not establish that every destination at a similar distance can succeed, but it demonstrates that a market previously dependent on connections can support substantial nonstop traffic when aircraft capability, tourism demand and route economics align.

Central Asia, Indonesia and other destinations beyond Gimhae’s traditional Northeast Asian core can consequently be treated as a field of network diversification in their own right rather than as intermediate steps on a progression that inevitably ends in North America or Europe. Some services will remain seasonal, some will fail, and others may eventually develop enough density to justify higher frequencies, but the relevant commercial test is whether they extend Busan’s established narrow-body model into durable markets before a fundamentally different aircraft and revenue structure becomes necessary.

A third category performs a different function because the destination airport provides access to a much larger network. Services to Singapore, Dubai or Istanbul, for example, cannot be evaluated solely according to the number of passengers whose journeys terminate in those cities. Singapore can provide onward access to Australia, India and other Southeast Asian markets, while Gulf and Turkish hubs connect into much larger networks across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One Busan route can therefore provide practical access to many markets whose individual demand could never support separate nonstop services.

The economic distinction between a long point-to-point route and a route entering a major connecting system is substantial. The former relies heavily on the strength of traffic between its two endpoints, whereas the latter can combine local passengers with onward demand spread across many cities. A sufficiently large Busan-Los Angeles market could support nonstop service if premium traffic, cargo, frequency and demand in both directions justify the aircraft, but the route’s value should be established through those economics rather than inferred from distance itself.

True long-haul flying belongs for that reason at the outer edge of the network strategy rather than at its rhetorical center. Flights approaching or exceeding 9,000 kilometers place different demands on fleet utilization, crew scheduling, maintenance and yield than the short- and medium-haul services that dominate Gimhae today, while frequency becomes especially important because an infrequent nonstop service may remain less practical for many passengers than a daily connecting alternative.

Busan’s 2026 route-support program exposes some of the tension between distance and network value. The current scheme offers 5 million won per flight for new medium-distance services between 2,500 and 5,000 kilometers when average load factors fall below 80 percent, while regular services of 5,000 kilometers or more can receive 10 million won per flight regardless of load factor and long-haul non-scheduled services 20 million won. Distance therefore affects the subsidy formula, but the evaluation framework is broader, also considering air-network expansion, operational sustainability, passenger growth and regional economic effects. The policy already contains the basis for asking not simply how far a publicly supported route flies, but how much useful connectivity remains after the initial support period ends.

A credible network strategy can therefore preserve the Asian density that already supports Gimhae, extend selectively into medium-haul markets where newer aircraft alter route economics, add a limited number of global connectors where onward networks materially broaden access, and reserve true long-haul services for markets capable of sustaining the necessary aircraft, frequency, yield and cargo. The objective is not to remove every connection from an international itinerary but to make a greater range of journeys from Busan commercially competitive, a task whose difficulty will depend heavily on who can reach the new airport once Gadeok opens.

The Market Gadeok Must Keep Before It Can Expand

The value of a broader air network will ultimately depend on passengers reaching it under conditions competitive with other airports, which makes ground access part of Gadeok’s aviation economics rather than an ancillary transportation issue. Regional development arguments frequently describe the future airport by combining the populations of Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang and treating the total as a prospective catchment, but travelers do not choose airports according to administrative boundaries. Access time and cost interact with available destinations, flight frequency, fares and onward connectivity, meaning that the same traveler may choose a different airport depending on the journey being made.

Gimhae’s present geography demonstrates how different an observed market can be from a theoretical regional population. With nearly four-fifths of surveyed passengers beginning their airport journey in Busan, including particularly large shares from Haeundae and Busanjin, the existing international market remains strongly concentrated inside the city. Gadeok therefore faces an unusual transition because a significant share of the market it must inherit lies in central and eastern Busan even though the future airport is being built farther west.

Before Gadeok can expand its effective market toward Ulsan, Changwon, Jinju or Daegu, the surrounding transport system must keep the new airport sufficiently competitive for travelers who already reach Gimhae from Haeundae, Centum, Seomyeon and other established origins. Ground transport therefore performs a retention function as well as an expansion function; a railway that improves access from more distant cities would deliver a smaller aviation benefit if the relocation simultaneously makes the airport substantially less convenient for the core market supplying much of today’s traffic.

The airport access railway itself is planned as a 16.5-kilometer double-track connection. In March 2026, a separate 6.58-kilometer link between the Bujeon-Masan railway and the Busan New Port line passed preliminary feasibility review, providing the planned connection through which services from central Busan and Ulsan could eventually reach the airport. The government’s feasibility case envisages ITX-Maum trains running at roughly 25-minute intervals between Taehwagang and Gadeok, with projected rail times of 26 minutes from Bujeon and 92 minutes from Taehwagang. Those figures belong to the current project plan rather than a final 2035 operating timetable and remain dependent on subsequent planning, construction and service decisions.

The difference between planned rail time and observed airport-access time is essential. The 26 minutes cited between Bujeon and Gadeok represent a station-to-station train journey, whereas the 45.7-minute average recorded in the Gimhae passenger survey measures travel from a passenger’s actual point of origin to the airport. A traveler using Gadeok must still reach Bujeon or another station, wait for the train, move from the airport railway platform into the terminal and retain sufficient schedule margin for disruption, making the complete door-to-terminal journey the more meaningful unit of comparison.

Regional markets require the same discipline. A roughly 92-minute direct rail service from Taehwagang would materially improve Ulsan’s access to Gadeok if delivered as planned, but it would not make Ulsan a captive aviation market. A traveler heading to Tokyo, Bangkok or Singapore would still compare frequencies and fares with competing airports, while someone traveling to Europe might rationally accept a longer surface journey to Incheon if the international itinerary is materially better. Improved rail access brings Gadeok into the traveler’s set of realistic choices; the air network determines how often the airport becomes the preferred one.

Changwon and the broader South Gyeongsang market present a related but operationally distinct case. Connecting the Bujeon-Masan railway to Gadeok can change the physical relationship between the airport and cities west of Busan, yet the passenger value ultimately depends on direct service patterns, stopping arrangements, frequency, first and last trains and the practicality of traveling with luggage. The presence of rail infrastructure creates the possibility of connectivity without guaranteeing the service quality that makes an airport journey competitive.

Daegu sharpens the distinction because rail access to Gadeok would place the airport into an overlapping market rather than extend a territory naturally belonging to Busan. The broader rail network can make services toward Dongdaegu feasible while the Daegu-Gyeongbuk region simultaneously pursues a new airport with substantial international ambitions of its own. For some destinations a future Daegu airport may offer the stronger product, while for others Gadeok or Incheon may prevail, making Daegu contestable rather than captive.

Geoje illustrates the opposite relationship between distance and institutional connectivity. Its geography places the city comparatively close to Gadeok and the existing road network provides access through the Geoga corridor, while proposals for a dedicated rail connection remain less advanced than some of the infrastructure being prepared for cities farther away. The contrast shows why neither straight-line distance nor regional population provides a sufficient account of the aviation market Gadeok will eventually serve.

BuTX could become particularly important inside Busan because the proposed rapid-transit system would link Gadeok through western Busan with the North Port, Bujeon, Centum and Osiria. The 54.043-kilometer private-investment proposal passed feasibility review in October 2025 and remains subject to subsequent concession, environmental and implementation procedures. If ultimately delivered with useful frequency and operating hours, its aviation significance would extend beyond reducing travel time to the city center, because the line could help preserve the eastern Busan passenger base that currently supports Gimhae while distributing inbound visitors toward several of the city’s principal tourism and commercial districts.

Gadeok’s eventual catchment is therefore better understood as a collection of overlapping passenger-choice markets than as a series of concentric rings around the airport. Central and eastern Busan form a retention market whose convenience the relocation cannot afford to ignore; Ulsan, Changwon and parts of South Gyeongsang constitute competitive corridors in which improved rail service could materially influence airport choice; Daegu belongs to a multi-airport market in which several gateways will compete for the same traveler; and Geoje remains geographically close while the institutional structure of its future connection is less settled. The size of Gadeok’s market will depend not on the population placed inside a nominal travel-time boundary, but on whether the full journey through the airport becomes competitive for the destination a passenger actually wants to reach.

The Four Clocks of a 24-Hour Airport

Gadeok’s planned ability to support round-the-clock operations is among the project’s most frequently cited advantages, although the commercial meaning of the capability is considerably more complex than the absence of an airport curfew. A wider operating window can give airlines greater freedom to construct Southeast Asian, long-haul and cargo schedules whose most productive departure and arrival times do not fit comfortably within Gimhae’s restrictions, allowing late-night departures to reach distant markets at useful morning times and potentially increasing the number of productive hours available to aircraft based in Busan.

Commercially meaningful 24-hour operation depends on several systems whose clocks do not automatically move together. Aircraft movements require airfield and air-traffic services; passenger operations require immigration, customs, security, baggage handling, ground staff and maintenance; airline schedules must fit aircraft rotations and useful arrival times at the other end of each route; and passengers and airport employees must still be able to reach or leave the terminal when flights operate during the night. Runway availability is therefore only one element of an operating system whose practical value depends on the alignment of terminal, airline and ground-transport schedules.

Comparable airports demonstrate why technical operating hours alone explain relatively little about commercial outcome. Central Japan International Airport near Nagoya has a 3,500-meter runway and officially operates 24 hours a day, with customs, immigration and quarantine also available around the clock, while large parts of its passenger terminals still close during nighttime hours. Fukuoka’s regulations likewise define airport operating hours as 24 hours while regular-flight schedules are ordinarily confined to 7 a.m. through 9:55 p.m. and takeoffs and landings to 7 a.m. through 10 p.m. in principle. Kansai, by contrast, demonstrates how an offshore airport can sustain a large international market when metropolitan demand and dense airline service use the available infrastructure, handling about 33.55 million passengers in fiscal 2025, including roughly 27.09 million international passengers.

The lesson for Gadeok is not that any one of those airports provides a template to copy, but that technical operating capability acquires economic value only through the schedules and services placed inside it. An airline could use a wider operating window to complete an additional narrow-body rotation, position a long-haul arrival near a useful transfer bank or operate cargo at a time that avoids daytime constraints, while another carrier might derive little value from the same hours because the schedule at the destination airport provides no useful counterpart.

Global connector routes make the relationship especially visible. A Busan-Singapore flight derives part of its utility from journeys available beyond Singapore, just as services into Dubai or Istanbul become more useful when passengers can connect efficiently to departures across Europe, the Middle East, Africa or other regions. The commercially optimal departure from Busan is therefore partly determined by another airport’s timetable, and Gadeok’s operating freedom would matter to the extent that it allows airlines to synchronize Busan with those networks more effectively.

Cargo follows the same logic because a shipment arriving at two in the morning gains little advantage from an unconstrained runway if customs, warehousing, ground handling or onward trucking cannot process it until later in the day. Passenger services confront a parallel problem when a late-night arrival is technically possible but no practical railway or bus service remains available for the traveler entering the city. The economic meaning of round-the-clock operation consequently lies in whether the additional hours improve aircraft utilization, connections, cargo movement and passenger access across the entire system rather than merely increasing the hours during which the runway can accept a flight.

2027 Comes Before 2035

The infrastructure surrounding Gadeok will expand what airlines are physically able to operate from Busan, but decisions about where aircraft are based and where new capacity is deployed belong to carriers rather than airports. For Busan, the corporate structure through which a large share of those decisions will be made is scheduled to change in March 2027, more than eight years before the current target for Gadeok’s opening.

Jin Air, Air Busan and Air Seoul approved and signed their merger agreement on August 21, 2026 and currently plan to launch the integrated Jin Air on March 17, 2027, subject to shareholder approval, regulatory authorization and the remaining corporate procedures. Based on the fleets operated by the three airlines at the end of 2025, the combined company would bring together 58 aircraft—31 at Jin Air, 21 at Air Busan and six at Air Seoul—making it the largest Korean low-cost carrier by fleet under the current comparison.

The consequences for Busan extend beyond the disappearance of Air Busan as an independent corporate identity. Air Busan carried 27.3 percent of Gimhae’s international passengers in 2025 and Jin Air another 15.9 percent, giving the two airlines a combined historical share of about 43 percent. That arithmetic is not a forecast of the integrated carrier’s future market position because routes, competitors and capacity will change after consolidation, but it demonstrates why the merged company’s allocation of aircraft and seats will carry unusual weight in Busan’s international market.

The merger also gives practical relevance to language first used when the broader Korean Air-Asiana integration was announced in November 2020. Korea Development Bank said that the phased combination of Jin Air, Air Busan and Air Seoul was expected to restructure the domestic LCC market, support the creation of a “Second Hub” based on regional airports and use available aircraft to expand routes originating and terminating at those airports. The statement did not identify Busan as the designated second hub and did not specify how many aircraft, seats, routes or connecting passengers would be required for the term to acquire operational meaning, leaving a strategic expectation that can now be tested against the allocation decisions made after integration.

The headquarters question matters economically, but it cannot provide that test by itself. Executive and administrative functions create employment and institutional relationships, yet an airport becomes an airline base through operating assets: aircraft remain overnight, crews begin and end rotations, maintenance supports the fleet, schedules are organized around the airport and incremental capacity is assigned there when the market expands. Corporate geography and operating geography can overlap without being identical.

A larger integrated airline could strengthen Busan’s operating position because a broader fleet offers greater recovery capacity during disruption, more flexibility to test new destinations and a wider system across which schedules can be coordinated. The same flexibility gives management more freedom to move aircraft toward whichever bases and markets generate the strongest returns, meaning that aircraft previously controlled by a carrier whose network was structurally tied to Busan will become part of a larger pool of mobile assets. Jin Air has already described the integration in terms of reorganizing routes and schedules according to market demand, using the enlarged fleet flexibly and strengthening the relationship between its Incheon and Busan networks.

Fleet allocation consequently provides a more useful long-term indicator than the combined fleet total. Fifty-eight aircraft say little about Busan unless the number routinely based there, the proportion of weekly seats originating at Gimhae, the aircraft types assigned to those services and the direction of capacity growth are also known. New-route announcements likewise reveal less than the frequencies and seats placed behind them, while crew, maintenance and other operating functions provide additional evidence of whether Busan is becoming a durable base from which the airline builds a network or remains primarily a large destination inside a system organized elsewhere.

Most of those indicators can be observed from 2027 onward rather than inferred retrospectively in 2035. Published schedules can be converted into weekly seat capacity, aircraft types and overnight bases can be compared across years, route additions and withdrawals can be followed, and substantive operating functions can be tracked as the merger proceeds. The broad 2020 language of a regional “Second Hub” can thereby be replaced with an empirical record showing whether the integrated carrier’s operating geography actually strengthens Busan.

The significance of the eight-year interval between integration and the new airport follows from the cumulative nature of airline decisions. If Busan’s international market continues to expand while based aircraft, weekly seats, network range and operating functions grow with it, Gadeok can inherit an airline system that already treats Busan as a platform from which routes are built. If passenger numbers increase while aircraft and higher-value functions become progressively concentrated elsewhere, the additional runway and terminal capacity available in 2035 will expand the set of possible operations without automatically reversing the airline structure established during the preceding years.

Transfer-Ready Is Not Transfer-Generating

An airport can be designed to accommodate transfers without generating enough connecting traffic to function as a hub. Terminal planners can shorten passenger walking distances, arrange immigration and security processes, build baggage systems capable of moving luggage between flights and reserve space for airline operations, all of which determine whether a connection is practicable once the necessary services exist; none of those facilities determines whether airlines will operate the arriving and departing flights in combinations that produce a viable connecting market.

Gadeok is already being designed with future transfer operations in mind. In June 2026, the construction authority convened its first formal consultative meeting with six Korean airlines serving Gimhae—Korean Air, Air Busan, Jin Air, Jeju Air, Eastar Jet and Trinity Airways—and discussed issues including airline facilities, transfer circulation and cargo handling as part of the terminal-design process. The consultation shows that transfer capability is being considered before the airport opens, but it does not establish that transfer traffic will exist at scale once the terminal is complete.

A connecting airport requires an incoming service, an onward flight, schedules close enough together to make the interchange useful, ticketing and baggage arrangements that protect the itinerary and enough frequency to prevent a missed connection from turning into a prolonged disruption. Those commercial requirements make the unresolved division of traffic between Gimhae and Gadeok more consequential than an administrative decision about which terminal handles which passengers.

Gadeok’s current basic-plan direction is centered on international operations, while the detailed operating structure is to be finalized before opening. Separately, Busan’s second-stage expansion master-plan study, conducted from August 2024 to March 2026, explicitly examined the possible integrated transfer of Gimhae’s domestic flights along with a second runway and additional terminal and apron capacity. The study establishes domestic integration as an active planning question rather than an approved operating decision.

A passenger beginning in Jeju illustrates why the eventual choice could affect the network product. If the domestic sector arrives at Gimhae while an international departure to Bangkok operates from Gadeok, the itinerary requires an inter-airport ground transfer, additional schedule margin and potentially separate baggage handling. If both sectors operate through Gadeok under compatible airline arrangements, the same journey can function as a conventional air-to-air connection inside one airport. A policy decision concerning the division of domestic and international traffic can therefore alter the quality of the itinerary an airline is capable of selling.

Domestic feed would not automatically transform Gadeok into a hub. Most passengers on Korean domestic routes are traveling to or from their destination rather than connecting internationally, while high-speed rail already substitutes for aviation across much of the mainland. The more relevant question is whether selected domestic markets can supply enough useful feed to strengthen international services whose local demand alone would not support the frequency or scale required for sustainable operation, with Jeju representing the clearest case because no rail alternative exists.

Regional rail creates the possibility of a hybrid structure in which part of the gathering function normally associated with feeder flights occurs on the ground. Travelers from Ulsan, Changwon, Jinju and other cities could reach the international terminal by rail without consuming runway capacity on short domestic sectors, broadening Gadeok’s origin market even if domestic aviation remains limited. Rail passengers and protected airline connections are not operationally identical, however, because passengers arriving by train generally bear responsibility for reaching the airport on time, whereas an air passenger traveling under a protected connection may receive through baggage handling and rebooking when the inbound sector is disrupted. A railway expected to perform part of the feeder function must therefore be judged by reliability, frequency and service hours as well as travel time.

A connecting airport also depends on the architecture of airline schedules rather than the number of flights operated during a day. Transfer flows grow when arrivals and departures are arranged closely enough for one set of services to feed another, which is why established hubs concentrate significant parts of their schedules into banks even though the resulting peaks place additional pressure on gates, baggage systems and runways. Gadeok’s wider operating window could create more room for those patterns, but only if airlines place enough aircraft and routes at the airport to make the resulting combinations commercially useful.

The future integrated low-cost carrier will therefore affect which operating model is plausible. A substantial Busan-based fleet would give one airline greater control over departure waves, aircraft rotations and coordination among short- and medium-haul routes, whereas a network in which aircraft mainly pass through Busan as individual point-to-point services organized around other bases could support a large and profitable international gateway while generating relatively little transfer traffic. Both outcomes can produce a successful airport; they differ in the way the network creates connectivity.

Foreign carriers introduce another constraint because terminal proximity cannot substitute for commercial relationships among airlines. Through-ticketing, interline agreements, alliances and baggage arrangements determine whether passengers can move efficiently from one carrier to another, meaning that an airport can display a dense route map while the underlying services remain fragmented into separate systems that force travelers to purchase independent tickets and accept the risk of missed connections.

The term “hub” therefore requires more precision than it often receives in regional development discussions. An airport with many international destinations can be a highly successful gateway, while an airport supported by a broad rail catchment can serve as a major southeastern regional gateway without handling a large proportion of connecting passengers. A hub requires an additional operating layer in which passengers can use Busan to travel between markets that are not themselves Busan because schedules, airline relationships and ground and terminal systems are deliberately organized around those connections.

Gadeok could ultimately occupy several positions along that spectrum. A large international origin-and-destination gateway serving Busan and a wider regional market would represent one commercially valuable outcome; another could combine that role with selective transfer flows where Northeast and Southeast Asian schedules align; a more ambitious connecting model would require domestic feed or an effective substitute for it, substantial based fleets, synchronized schedules and connector routes capable of supporting transfers at scale. The eventual division of roles between Gimhae and Gadeok should follow from a clearly defined operating model, because separating domestic and international traffic and consolidating them at one airport create different benefits as well as different constraints.

From 335,000 Tons to One Million

Cargo reveals the same gap between physical capability and market formation in another part of the project. The current Gadeok plan forecasts approximately 335,000 tons of international air cargo in 2065, whereas Busan’s broader logistics strategy has promoted a future multimodal system capable of handling considerably more, including policy ambitions that have exceeded 1 million tons. The two figures should not be presented as alternative official forecasts because they answer different questions: the former is the demand forecast embedded in the airport plan, while the latter depends on additional cargo being attracted, redirected or generated through a larger logistics system.

Gadeok possesses a genuine geographic advantage in its proximity to Busan New Port, and the city has made Sea&Air logistics a formal part of its development strategy. In May 2026, Busan launched a dedicated implementation study for an air-logistics base at the new airport, explicitly focusing on the development of maritime-air multimodal flows linked with the port.

Geographic proximity nevertheless establishes an opportunity rather than a freight market. High-value goods, urgent industrial parts, electronic components and shipments that become time-sensitive after a long sea journey may benefit when cargo can move efficiently from ship to aircraft, while most containerized freight has no economic reason to enter a much more expensive air-transport chain simply because a runway is nearby. The commercially relevant market consists of shipments for which the time saved in the combined journey is valuable enough to justify the additional handling and air-freight cost compared with an all-sea service, direct air shipment from another origin or transfer through an established logistics hub.

Aircraft availability imposes a further constraint because cargo terminals do not move freight. A substantial proportion of international air cargo travels in the belly holds of passenger aircraft, making the expansion of longer passenger services and global connector routes part of the cargo strategy as well as the passenger strategy. Dedicated freighter operations can provide considerably more capacity but require regular volumes capable of supporting aircraft whose economics depend primarily on freight, while the intended advantage of round-the-clock logistics is weakened whenever customs, warehousing or onward transportation fails to operate at compatible hours.

The distance between the 335,000-ton forecast and the larger logistics ambition should consequently be treated as a market-development burden rather than a discrepancy that can be resolved by selecting one figure over another. Terminal capacity will show what Gadeok is physically capable of processing; actual cargo tonnage will show how much demand materializes; the origins, destinations and types of freight will reveal whether the airport attracts genuinely new multimodal flows; and the development of freighter services, passenger belly capacity and repeated port-to-airport transfers will show whether proximity to Busan New Port becomes a commercial logistics product rather than remaining primarily a geographic advantage.

What Gadeok Will Inherit

When Gadeok opens, the runway, terminal, railway station and operating environment will be new, but the aviation market surrounding those facilities will have been shaped by decisions accumulated over the preceding decade. Busan will already have learned which parts of its dense Asian network can support additional frequency, which medium-haul experiments can become permanent, whether selected routes into major connecting systems can broaden the city’s global reach and how much airline capacity remains based in the region after consolidation of the domestic low-cost sector.

The ground network will have undergone a comparable test because the construction of new rail infrastructure and the creation of an effective airport catchment are not the same event. Services toward Ulsan and South Gyeongsang may place Gadeok into the practical airport choices of populations that currently contribute relatively little to Gimhae’s international traffic, but the new airport will first have to remain sufficiently competitive for the heavily Busan-centered market it inherits. The eventual regional reach of Gadeok will therefore be determined by complete passenger journeys and airline schedules rather than by the largest population that can be drawn inside a nominal rail-time contour.

Some of the decisions most capable of shaping that outcome will begin to reveal themselves almost immediately. The integrated low-cost carrier scheduled to emerge in March 2027 will distribute aircraft, seats, crews and routes across a larger system for more than eight years before the current Gadeok opening target; national and local authorities will have to clarify the relationship between Gimhae and Gadeok and the future location of domestic traffic; rail agencies will have to turn infrastructure projects into timetables whose frequency and service hours determine whether early-morning and late-night flights are genuinely usable; and airlines will decide whether the operating freedom available at Gadeok warrants new rotations, longer services or schedules capable of generating connecting traffic.

Cargo will be subjected to the same process of commercial proof. Proximity to Busan New Port provides an opportunity that few Korean airports can reproduce, yet traffic beyond the airport’s baseline forecast will have to be supported by shipments, aircraft capacity, customs operations and multimodal products that logistics companies and shippers repeatedly choose. The same principle applies across the passenger side of the airport: rail access becomes economically consequential when it changes passenger behavior, round-the-clock capability when airlines build profitable schedules around the extra hours, and transfer facilities when carriers create itineraries that passengers can actually buy.

None of these conditions diminishes the importance of building the airport itself. Without additional runway capacity, a broader operating window and improved regional transport, many of the network possibilities under discussion would remain constrained before airlines had an opportunity to test them. Infrastructure establishes a wider range of feasible outcomes, while the market that develops around it determines which of those outcomes can persist. Much of the same physical airport could support a large international origin-and-destination gateway, a wider southeastern regional gateway or a more developed connecting operation, because the distinction among those models ultimately lies in the organization of aircraft, schedules, passengers and commercial relationships around the infrastructure.

The years leading to the second half of 2035 may consequently reveal more about Gadeok’s eventual role than the construction schedule viewed on its own. If Busan continues to deepen the Asian network that already sustains Gimhae, establishes durable medium-haul and selected connecting services, retains airline capacity consistent with the growth of its market and turns regional rail investments into passenger journeys competitive with alternative airports, the new airport will open into an aviation system already substantially more complex than the one operating today. If those elements develop separately or remain weakly coordinated, Gadeok can still provide valuable capacity and operating flexibility, but the commercial result may remain closer to a larger international gateway than to the connecting hub envisioned in the region’s most ambitious plans.

By the time the first scheduled services move to Gadeok, airlines will already have spent years deciding which routes merit continued frequency and where their aircraft should be based; passengers will have developed travel habits around competing airports and connecting networks; railway projects will have become either dependable operating services or incomplete links in a larger system; and the unresolved questions surrounding domestic feed, airline consolidation and multimodal cargo will have moved much closer to practical answers. The economic value of the new runway and terminal will emerge from their interaction with those accumulated choices, making the character of the airport that opens in 2035 a product not only of the engineering undertaken at Gadeok, but of the aviation, railway and logistics networks that Busan and the wider southeast build during the years before the airport is ready to receive them.