In a dispatch sent this week to the Ministry of Construction and the People’s Committees of Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai Province, the Airports Corporation of Vietnam (ACV) flagged a planning collision that has been building for months.
Long Thanh is supposed to be served by three direct rail links: the North-South high-speed railway, the Thu Thiem-Long Thanh urban railway, and an extension of the Ben Thanh-Suoi Tien metro line from Ho Chi Minh City. All three are now slated to run along a vacant land strip roughly 40 meters wide along the airport’s central axis, with stations feeding directly into the terminal.
The problem is that the strip was originally designed for only two of them. ACV had already locked in route alignments, station locations and connection plans for the North-South high-speed line and the Thu Thiem-Long Thanh project. The metro extension, approved in principle by the government in March under an emergency fast-track mechanism, was layered onto the same corridor afterwards. The operator says it has still not received any planning documents, proposed route or station siting for the metro extension inside the airport’s boundaries, leaving it without a basis to coordinate.
ACV is asking the Ministry of Construction to step in and lead a comprehensive review of how the three projects will share the corridor, warning that without unified coordination, Long Thanh faces the risk of cramped construction, on-site conflicts during the build, and operational headaches once the terminal is open. The operator has also called on Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai authorities to push the three projects’ developers to align on routing, station placement and connection design before construction moves deeper.
Long Thanh Airport’s passenger terminal under construction in Dong Nai Province, southern Vietnam, in April 2026. Photo by Read/Phuoc Tuan |
Long Thanh, built across roughly 5,000 hectares about 40 kilometers east of Ho Chi Minh City with a total investment of VND336.63 trillion (US$12.8 billion), is in the final stretch of its first phase and is scheduled to enter commercial operation by the end of 2026 with capacity for 25 million passengers a year.
At full build-out across three phases, it is designed to handle 100 million passengers annually, putting it among the largest airports in Southeast Asia and easing longstanding pressure on the existing Tan Son Nhat Airport in Ho Chi Minh City.
Each of the three rail projects addresses a different gap. The Thu Thiem-Long Thanh line, the most urgent of the three, is the primary high-capacity link between downtown Ho Chi Minh City and the new airport, and construction is targeted to begin by July.
The extension of the Ben Thanh-Suoi Tien metro, currently the city’s only operational metro line, would push Vietnam’s first urban rail route out to Dong Nai’s new administrative center and onward to the airport.
The North-South high-speed railway, a long-planned national project, would bring inter-regional traffic to the airport from major economic centers across the country.
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