It is located in the Sepang District of Selangor , approximately 45 km 28 mi south of downtown Kuala Lumpur and serves the city's greater conurbation. Kuala Lumpur International Airport is the largest and busiest airport in Malaysia and is recognised as a mega hub. In , it handled In , KLIA is the ranked first by OAG by ratio of connection flight frequency to destinations served in the Global Low-Cost Megahubs index by with 11, possible low-cost connections across over destinations.
The construction of the airport was done mainly by a few state owned construction companies as well as Ekovest Berhad β helmed by Tan Sri Datuk Lim Kang Hoo. It was created as part of the Multimedia Super Corridor , a grand development plan for Malaysia. The chief architect who designed the new airport terminal was the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. Malaysia Airports agreed to redevelop the remaining Terminal 3 to create a specialist airport for turboprop and charter planes surrounded by a residential area and a business park.
The airport's site spans square kilometres 39 sq mi 2 [ 9 ] of former agricultural land and is one of the world's largest airport sites. An ambitious three-phase development plan anticipates KLIA to have three runways and two terminals each with two satellite terminals. The Phase One airport had 60 contact piers, 20 remote parking bays with 80 aircraft parking positions, four maintenance hangars and fire stations.
Phase Two, designed to increase capacity to 35 million passengers per year, is largely complete. Phase Three is anticipated to increase capacity to million passengers per year.
The inauguration of the airport was marked with numerous problems. The aerobridge and bay allocation systems broke down, with queues building up throughout the airport and the baggage handling breaking down. Bags were lost, and there were waits of over five to seven hours. The airport suffered greatly reduced traffic with the general reduction in economic activity brought about by the Asian financial crisis , September 11 attacks , SARS , bird flu epidemic Avian flu , the financial crisis of β , the swine flu pandemic and the COVID pandemic.
