By chance, rather than any plan on my part, I happened to be involved in the making of a bit of history on October 27.

My overnight British Airways flight BA039 from London Heathrow was the first international flight to land at Beijing's new Daxing airport.

We were alerted to this fact about our soon impending destiny by the captain after we had climbed through torrents of rain heading towards England's Suffolk coastline.

After a flying time of just 8 hours 40 minutes (with strong tailwinds cutting more than an hour off the normal 8,200-kilometer journey) we descended into bright sunshine for our landing at 9:13 am.

I joked to a fellow passenger that I wondered if there would be a band playing for us on our arrival.

What I didn't realize was that was not far off the reality of what did happen. As we emerged bleary eyed from the Boeing 777 aircraft, we were soon greeted by Chinese TV film crews who wanted to interview passengers about their experience of the new airport.

There is something surreal about being the only arrival at an airport that has a capacity to handle 45 million passengers annually.

One had a sense of this being a Wright Brothers or Louis Bleriot event, rather than just routine long-haul aviation.

Instead of heading straight to immigration, many of us hung around to take photos of the plane now docked at the gate, waiting to be the first foreign international airline to depart.

By then, our genial captain was out of the plane chatting cheerily to someone from the airport who told him that the wrappings were literally still being taken off all the new equipment that morning.

As I proceeded through the airport, every member of the airport staff I met smiled to me and said ni hao.

They had no doubt been building up to the moment they would encounter real people during their training for months.

The actual walking distance to immigration and customs is not very far from whichever gate you land, because of the unusual starfish shape of the airport.

With ours being the only arrival, there was only one luggage carousel operating and so suitcases were instantly available.

The final flourish was when you got outside. There was a whole fleet of taxis available with drivers almost standing to attention to assist you beside their open boots (or trunks, if you must). It was certainly not something I have ever experienced at the Beijing Capital International Airport.

The $11.7 billion airport has come under criticism for being much further from the city－some 46 km－than the existing capital airport. My taxi journey was 90 minutes to Northeast Beijing and the fare was 245 yuan ($35), compared with 30 minutes and less than 100 yuan usually from the old airport.

The logic, however, of Daxing's location is that it will be the main aviation hub for the Xiongan New Area, the megacity of which Tianjin and Hebei province will be a part, as well as Beijing.

Remarkably, it has taken only five years to complete. In contrast the then United Kingdom government announced plans for a third runway at Heathrow, the airport I had just left hours before, in 2009 and there is still no agreement on actually building it.

The magnificent curved design of the airport is in itself a statement about China's ambition and commitment to the future.

This was acknowledged in an interview I did with the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, who designed it, for China Daily at her Clerkenwell, London, office, in 2011.

"Countries like China have led to standards going up. They realize you can do something really quite exciting and interesting," she told me.

"In the West, things are more frozen because there is an obsession with historical context. This sense you can't build anything new is nonsense. How would history have progressed if every generation couldn't have put on a new layer? The Romans themselves were not frozen in time."

Many of us who arrived on that British Airways flight, no matter how jet-lagged, would, I am sure, say "hear! hear!" to that.

Contact the writer at andrewmoody@chinadaily.com.cn