Airport Congestion Becoming Major Problem

According to the influential Airline Business magazine, Lufthansa, an airline that prides itself on its on-time service, is even beginning to log delays on its intra European services due to massive congestion at its Frankfurt hub. The Frankfurt airport complex catered for traffic in 1987 that only a few years ago was not expected to be reached till the year 2000! Frankfurt also logged an increase in delayed flights during 1987 of 40% over the previous year’s figure while Lufthansa aircraft alone spent 600 hours just holding over Frankfurt awaiting a landing clearance. Total 1987 delays cost Lufthansa some $US30m or roughly half its net profit. And LH is not alone, almost all major European and North American carrier are reporting rapidly escalating costs as a result of worsening airways and airport congestion.

The situation in Europe doesn’t look to be getting better either. It is estimated that by 1995 17 of Europe’s 43 major airports will have reached maximum capacity with this figure increasing to 25 by 2000. Heathrow is left with no more available runway space and while talk of a Terminal 5 will help the on-ground situation it may only serve to worsen the airside aspect of the equation. Gatwick will not get a second runway and is due to run out of capacity around 1993 while single runway Stansted is becoming more and more a reliever airport to London’s big two. Across the pond in North America, the situation is even worse.

Some 58 airports will handle more than three quarters of the total capacity by the end of the century while even today 16 airports are listed as seriously congested. The US system catered for 450m pax in 1987 and this is conservatively expected to increase to at least 750m by the year 2000. Delays into major hubs are meaning that passengers are frequently missing vital connections which in turn only serves to exacerbate the logistics problems in already overcrowded terminals and ticket counter areas.

Asia fares a little better, though primarily because most traffic is not of a true domestic nature. Bangkok and Singapore boast excellent facilities while Hong Kong is still wrestling with the concept of building an entirely new airport in Hong Kong harbour on reclaimed land or labouring on with a very geriatric Kai Tak. Japan has always been congested and nowadays is reaching a critical situation. Narita is already requiring a second runway and terminal while there is little scope for improving downtown Haneda.

Australia fortunately has only one critical area and as everyone knows, that is Sydney. Flights into Sydney now have to literally book a slot and are regularly held on the ground elsewhere until their arrival slot is approved. Slot delays may be caused by a number of factors though adverse weather is the principal culprit. Essentially, KSA has an annual theoretical fixed wing capacity of 218,000 movements, a figure which was exceeded last year. In real terms though the airport can cater for more with just a little luck in the weather department. In fine weather the airport has handled up to 60 movements in the one hour using simultaneous movements or as on the Thursday prior to Easter this year, up to 794 movements with very little delay. A wind shift or storm though can throw this finely balanced ATC act into chaos as runways are changed and aircraft are vectored onto different approaches.

Another factor that would help increase movement capacity at KSA is a relaxation of the existing night-time curfews. Essentially, only propeller driven aircraft and light corporate jets can operate from KSA between 11pm and 6am. This is despite the fact that an Electra, Friendships and most other prop driven airfreighters are noisier than a properly flown BAe 146, Boeing 737, 767 or an Airbus A300 or A320. On the few occasions that an international 747 has made an in-curfew overwater approach onto Runway 34 in the dead of night, no local residents have complained for the simple reason that none even heard it. This of course is still a political red herring but with a change of government in NSW and sensible noises coming from Canberra on the matter of classifying a new generation of ‘low noise’ aircraft in the BAe 146 class as curfew exempt, then maybe this will serve to increase KSA’s capacity in the years ahead.

Unfortunately the situation worldwide is hindered greatly by a litany of both valid and often unrealistic environmental considerations. While everybody wants a new, bigger, more capable airport, few people want them nearby. It’s as simple as that and in an ever crowded world it is nowadays physically difficult to find sites that are not only large enough, but are also close enough to the city they claim to serve. Narita, serving Tokyo, is a $A140 cab fare from the terminal to any downtown hotel which takes over an hour in the off peak! Even this remote airport, despite its relative isolation had to endure a very protracted and bloody war in its building stage against local community and radical political groups who virulently opposed construction of a major airport in the region.

Ironically in Sydney, the residents of Badgery’s Creek did everything they legally could not to get a proposed airport while by contrast most of the citizens of Wilton campaigned actively to get same. Naturally, Badgery’s won as the government favoured option and the saddest thing is that even today many of the affected land owners are still awaiting some form of compensation from the Federal Government. In the meantime their property has devalued and is virtually unsaleable as rural land even though the new airport won’t be built probably till well into the next century!

The solution to the worldwide problem of airport congestion is simply more airports, vastly improved airways/ATC radar and traffic management systems and of course a move towards larger short/medium range aircraft backed up by a greater use of point to point services.

The first point is greatly hindered by environmental, logistics and costs grounds. There has been no new major airport opened in the USA since Dallas/Fort Worth in 1974 while the new airports at Munich, Osaka and Denver are essentially replacements for existing overtaxed facilities.

Improved airways/ATC systems are coming in Australia in the form of an ongoing plan to upgrade primary control area radars, terminal area radars and the new Australian Radar Sensor Procurement Programme (RASPP) that will introduce modern day Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSA) en route coverage to much of Australia by 1993 (refer p. 88 Jan 88 AA).

Overseas, the USA is planning to implement an ambitious $US16bn National Airspace System though this too battles for survival as Capitol Hill constantly works to pare the massive US deficit. The rub here is that on each US domestic airline ticket there is an 8% tax. Revenue from this tax goes direct to the Airways & Airport Trust Fund which is supposed to then allocate these funds to improving the US airways/airports system. For many years the money, in fact some $US6bn of it, has been squirrelled away into federal coffers to make the overall US deficit appear smaller. If Congress now gave, as it rightly should, that funding to the FAA and its associated agencies for much needed improvements, then it would make the federal deficit look even worse. And that is something that is certainly not about to happen in an election year! The other factor that will inevitably occur is the swing from smaller 120/150 seat aircraft to 200+ seat twinjets operating the major primary trunks. This is already happening and is evidenced by the improved selling rate of aircraft like the Boeing 757, 767 and Airbus A300/310 over the past two years. An increased use of smaller jets, in the F28, Fokker 100 and BAe 146 class, serving communities on a non stop point to point service will also help to alleviate congestion at the major hubs. In east coast Australia, for instance, if you don’t actually live in Sydney or Melbourne you can bet that on more than 90% of occasions you will have to transit one of these hubs just to fly somewhere else. A greater use of non stop point to point services, using fast propjets and small F28/146 type jets will also help KSA in the longer term as much as it will Atlanta-it’s a case of simple mathematics and was verified in the May Report which revealed over 100 potential secondary point to point sectors in Australia that were presently being ignored by the two domestics. For civil aviation to prosper, its operating base must be able to grow to meet the demands placed upon it by the consumer. As we head towards the close of another century, it is patently obvious that some hard decisions will have to be taken by many people in many lands in order to ensure that air transport as we know it survives and prospers into the twenty first century.