Biography|Akbar Al Baker — The Soft Opening of Hamad on 30 April

People treat Hamad International as a building that opened on time.

It did not.

The project, first called New Doha International Airport, had been aimed at 2009.

It missed a ceremonial date of 12 December 2012 and an April 2013 soft launch cancelled an hour before a passenger aircraft was due to land.

Doha News put the bill at 15.5 billion US dollars.

On 30 April 2014 the field finally took a Qatar Airways Airbus A320 that had lifted from the old airport a few minutes earlier, carrying local dignitaries onto the new easterly runway.

Airport Technology and Doha News both date that first landing to the same morning.

Al Baker, who was also chief executive of the airport company, called the touchdown a historic moment for the airline and for the state.

Ten other carriers were already booked to use the terminal in the first days.

Qatar Airways itself would not move the rest of its schedule until 27 May.

About sixty percent of the 29-square-kilometre site sits on land reclaimed from the Gulf, four kilometres east of the old Doha International runway he had run since 1997.

Design capacity on opening day was about thirty million passengers a year.

The pin is the terminal that opened that April, photographed the following month.

A visitor now walks a much larger campus than the 2014 soft-launch building.

Later expansion, a World Cup year, and Skytrax airport titles sit on top of this first morning.

The work that defined his second decade was not a route announcement.

It was getting this field past Civil Defence checks and onto a live taxiway.

Photo: Chris Hoare, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons