(Posted 15th October 2026)
Courtesy of Mohamed Rafique / LinkedIn
Ethiopian Airlines has published its prequalified bidders for the four main packages of Bishoftu International Airport. Contractor selection has moved from August 2026 to early January 2027, so bidders have more time to arrange financing.
Each package is structured as engineering, procurement, construction and finance. The contractor is expected to bring funding as well as the build.
What Phase 1 involves:
About $12.5 billion. 60 million passengers a year at opening. Opening targeted for 2030. Around 45 km southeast of Addis Ababa. Designed by Zaha Hadid Architects with Sidara. Four EPC-plus-finance packages.
At full build-out, plans point to 110 million passengers a year across four runways, with parking for around 270 aircraft.
The shortlist had 33 positions, per Kulu Media. Chinese groups hold 15 of them across ten companies. Ground was broken in January.
The money is the real test. Ethiopian Airlines is funding 20% to 30% itself and needs more than $9 billion from external lenders, CEO Mesfin Tasew told ch-aviation. The African Development Bank is lead arranger.
Twenty years in this region, and I have watched hub carriers reshape their cities around new airports. Ethiopia is attempting the same thing at continental scale.
The part four packages create
Four packages, possibly four contractor groups, on one site of around 35 sq km. Each brings its own subcontractors, camps, plant yards and shift patterns.
For years, the construction perimeter will move month by month. Haul roads open and close. Zones hand over between packages. Areas that were open ground become controlled.
Then the site turns into an operating airport, where every badge is tied to a zone and every zone has its own rules. Airside, landside, cargo, maintenance and fuel all run differently.
The hard period sits between those two states. Contractors from different packages need verifying at shared boundaries, and headcount in open ground still has to be right during an alarm. The permanent terminal systems will be among the last things commissioned.
The integrators who map the access picture early on programmes like this tend to be the ones still there at handover. The ones who arrive after spend the first months catching up.
If you are following Bishoftu or other large airport programmes, I am happy to compare notes. The handheld access and mustering layer alongside the fixed system is the corner I work in.
