The madness of second airports

Chiang Mai should build a high-speed railway, Greater HCMC wants a 3rd airport when it can't even build the 2nd, build a railway for Haiphong, and the weird Kedah proposal

While I have been in Chiang Mai I’ve been wondering about the proposed second airport that was in the news a few years ago.

The airport was approved in 2018 and it was expected to begin construction in 2019. The news trail of the second airport goes cold after that. Covid obviously put a damper on the appetite for airport projects.

Air traffic is now getting back to pre-pandemic levels, so talk of new and expanded airports is in the news cycle again.

While there is a need to maintain and expand airports, at what point should a city have two airports? I also wonder if the national transport bodies are overseeing these plans, or are the airport and railway bodies working separately and in competition with each other, to the detriment of better transport for the nation?