Issue 89: August 1993

Due to the nature of the lease, Schofields mostly operates as an operational airfield on weekends and most readers would remember the airfield for it’s hosting of numerous popular airshows during the late seventies and early to mid eighties. In fact it was the success of these major airshows that eventually led to the incredibly successful Bicentennial Airshow in 1988 and the international class efforts from Airshows DownUnder since at Richmond and most recently Avalon. As a flying club, Schofields has to be one of the best and certainly deserves a solid future, something that ironically it does not have.

And why? Well, HMAS Nirimba of course is Dept of Defence (DoD) property and as such is surplus to government requirements. Like many defence related establishments around Australia it is for sale and basically to the highest bidder. On the surface you would say, “well great, now it can be properly developed as a true GA airfield and be an asset to the regional community”. Reality unfortunately might well suggest that the case is not so simple and that there is a strong chance that this gem of an airport will be lost forever to the residents of Sydney.

The DoD has vacillated for several years on what to do with Schofields. At one time Blacktown Council was most enthusi- astic about retaining the obvious employment and revenue generating capabilities of the airfield but these councillors have mostly now gone, replaced by a team that one would hardly say were pro aviation. So, to get things moving DoD appointed a committee which surprisingly included not one single person from the aviation community to look into the future of HMAS Nirimba. To say that the committee is generally non enthusiastic about aviation is a supreme understate- ment. In fact, their initial terms of reference didn’t even canvass the possibility of even retaining aviation as a possible future use for the facility! Hearing this (though themselves not officially even being consulted), the Schofields Flying Club and the Federal Airports Corporation rapidly launched a campaign to put some realism back into the debate in an effort to save what is an irreplaceable resource.

Sydney, for its size is terribly under resourced with GA airfields. On a population basis, Melbourne for instance has twice as many GA fields as Sydney whilst to make matters worse Hoxton Park, with more annual movements than all of Tasmania combined, will ultimately be closed as suburbia further intrudes upon its back door and airspace around Camden will ultimately have to be limited due to eventual heavy jet usage at Badgerys Creek. “Ah! That’s a long way in the future,” you say. Not really. It is about as far distant as 1975 was in the past, which for your greying editor was like yesterday. Bankstown is also near capacity and GA at Mascot is a no go. To lose Schofields, which could be fully developed by the FAC, would be a monumental disaster on par with the selling off of Sydney rail corridors during the Depression just to raise short term funds for a cash hungry State government. Badgerys Creek will also be a GA airfield for only a very short time, as soon as the first Boeings crank up there, in just a few years, it will be increasingly difficult to operate private and flight school type ops from what three decades hence will probably be as heavy jet active as KSA is today.

Under FAC ownership, Schofields would be upgraded to provide a multi use aviation, education and business facility. Environmental studies do not indicate that noise would be a problem for educational use, after all there are already major school facilities on both Bankstown and Parafield airports. Schofields would also be restricted to aircraft of under 5700kg so the biggest aircraft you are likely to see there would be a Beech King Air.

Annual movements are envisaged as being restricted to around 100,000, about the same as currently flown at Camden (without any noise problems from the rapidly expanding communities nearby) and far less than the 180,000 or so maximum that Schofields could theoretically accommodate. If history. evolves as expected, by 2010, Camden will be nearing capacity, Hoxton will be a housing development whilst both KSA and Badgerys will quite rightly be exclusively reserved for the heavy metal of aviation. With Sydney GA activity expected to double over the next 30 years Australia’s largest city desperately needs to retain Schofields for GA, it’s as simple as that! At the time of writing though aviation did not appear to be winning the battle for Schofields. The DoD committee has basically recommended that the base be sold off for housing and other uses including a TAFE college and campus facility for the University of Western Sydney. Nirimba does have some excellent educational facilities to offer and it is on this basis that all the FAC wants is to be able to sit down with the Minister and those responsible for decision making from the various education institutions and explain how Schofields can be retained as both a GA airport and an educational facility par excellence. However, at presstime nothing had happened and the FAC had not even had the courtesy of a reply from Defence Minister Robert Ray’s office.

The final decision as to Schofields fate was due to have been handed down by the Minister last November but was delayed as the decision became potentially emotive with a crucial federal election imminent. Now, more than half a year later, a decision is still awaited and quite frankly aviation seems to be the last thing that Schofields will be used for a few years from now if what we are hearing is accurate.

If Schofields is lost to aviation then that loss will be looked at by future generations as one of the most singularly short sighted government decisions of the nineteen nineties. Let’s all hope our fears are unwarranted.