Defense Ministry, South Jeolla-Gwangju push to accelerate Muan military airport relocation

The South Jeolla-Gwangju integrated special city and the Ministry of National Defense are aligning their efforts to break ground early on the Muan military airport relocation project. Significant variables remain — including the scale of maritime land reclamation and negotiations over the relocation of US military facilities — but both sides have made clear they intend to resolve outstanding issues and shorten the overall project timeline, raising expectations that the master plan tender will proceed smoothly.

The integrated city government has published a notice on detailed evaluation criteria and preparation guidelines for the performance qualification and technical proposal assessments for the new South Jeolla-Gwangju military airport master plan study, and is accepting public comments through Wednesday. Firms seeking to participate in the study are required to present specific measures for addressing key issues to enable an early ground-breaking.

The issues identified include concluding a memorandum of agreement with the Defense Ministry, securing project plan approval, amending the public waters reclamation master plan, and managing potential delays and interface issues in US military facility negotiations. Rather than treating each procedure in isolation, the city has called on contractors to develop a comprehensive action plan that analyzes the sequencing and interdependencies of all steps in order to reduce the overall project duration.

The Defense Ministry had already reached an agreement with Gwangju Metropolitan City, South Jeolla Province and Muan-gun at a six-party consultative body meeting convened by the presidential office on Dec. 17 last year, committing to the integrated relocation of Gwangju's military and civilian airports to Muan International Airport.

The joint statement signed at the time by Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back and others stipulated that 1 trillion won ($747 million) of development proceeds would be channeled into community support projects for Muan-gun residents, and pledged active cooperation on amending the Special Act on the Relocation of the Gwangju Military Airport. Building on that high-level agreement, the Defense Ministry has said it will move swiftly to support the follow-on administrative steps — concluding the memorandum of agreement and obtaining project plan approval. That both procedures were listed as separate issues in the evaluation criteria is widely interpreted as a signal that the focus is on how quickly pre-set processes can be executed, not on whether they will proceed.

On the reclamation front, minimizing both the scale of maritime land reclamation and the impact of aircraft noise has been identified as a core challenge for the master plan. The city has directed contractors to develop earthwork and facility layout plans that minimize the reclamation footprint and noise impact zone, drawing on the runway configuration proposed in preliminary studies. Reducing earthwork volumes and maritime reclamation is seen as a way not only to improve economic viability but also to limit permitting issues that could arise during traffic, environmental and disaster impact assessments.

Amending the public waters reclamation master plan is treated not merely as a design matter but as a permitting hurdle that will determine when construction can begin. The city plans to manage it through a workable roadmap and risk management framework linked to other administrative procedures.

Negotiations over the relocation of US military facilities are also cited as a variable that could affect the ground-breaking schedule. The city has asked contractors to assess in advance the likelihood of delays in US facility consultations and their potential impact on the project timeline, and to prepare a contingency roadmap that coordinates those negotiations with other procedures. The approach is seen as a strategy to bring the risk of negotiation delays under active management from the outset, minimizing any knock-on effect on the overall schedule even if delays do occur.

With the Defense Ministry and the city aligning on both the high-level agreement and the detailed administrative steps, observers say the Muan military airport relocation project has narrowed to a question of how remaining issues will be coordinated. The city plans to finalize the detailed evaluation criteria after the public comment period closes this month, then proceed with the tender for the new military airport master plan study.

The government is also considering establishing a new Honam Regional Aviation Office and renaming Muan International Airport as part of efforts to develop it into a hub airport for the southwestern region, further fueling local expectations tied to the military airport relocation.