Fair airport access and pricing

As aircraft size and passenger numbers grew, airports undertook costly expansions, but have the costs been fairly apportioned? One can park near many regional terminals – for free – quickly unload, check-in, and after a short wait in an adequate terminal board your flight, with your airline often having negotiated reasonable airport user fees. But at bigger places – and not just the major capitals – a more time consuming and costly process awaits.

Airport locations, charges, and operating hours have long been political hot potatoes, especially at Sydney.

Slot constraints, charges, and cost and availability of hangar space are particular problems, especially for regional operators.

Elsewhere, some regional ports have plans to chase international flights or other activities way above what their local regional services need. Ballina pushes a Lismore freight hub, while the Sunshine Coast wants a new runway to accommodate internationals. The Capricornia Regional Integrated Transport Plan sets out specific target international routes and extensions to Rockhampton’s runway 15/33 to meet takeoff distances for possible Honolulu and Tokyo sectors.

But at most airports, 1960s era infrastructure for DC-9s and 727s meets today’s narrowbody A320/737 needs, while 1950s era infrastructure for Fokker F27s is perfectly fine for today’s Dash 8s, Saab 340s and ATR 72s. Some apron and terminal expansion has been needed for larger A320s and 737‑800s, but regional passengers and their carriers don’t need such costly expansions and should not have to pay for them. They should be passed squarely to the heavier jets.

On the other hand, if ATC has to be upgraded – staff, radar, towers, new instrument approaches to handle the greater traffic – a case exists to charge all, as without this the regionals would also suffer.

Clearly the government must act to set a national airport pricing regime that reflects the cost of the facilities the aircraft needs, so that regionals are not disadvantaged against the big players.

One fair basis might be a flag fall passenger head charge for aircraft up to 30 tonnes, plus straight line weight based increments above that, to service the capital costs of the airport infrastructure they demand.

Just monitoring charges won’t fix this issue.

Back to Sydney.

Sydney has a curfew, fair enough, but its runway traffic capacity far exceeds the blatantly political 80 movements/ hour cap (which has no ‘breach’ provision to make up for weather or incident caused movement delays).

Traffic levels and growth projections show morning and, to a lesser degree, evening slots at or approaching the 80 movement limit – a particular concern for regional operators looking to add new ‘same day return’ services.

The cap puts further pressure on regional operators due to wake turbulence separation standards, which in turn drives congestion.

Regional turboprops can’t be put as close behind a ‘heavy’ (widebody) and ‘super’ (A380) movement as a narrowbody jet.

The issue here then is that such is the revenue pull of the widebodies, access afforded sub 80-seaters – almost the entire regional fleet – could eventually be squeezed, the current regional access provisions not withstanding.

There are few options.

Reworking the basis of the cap from ‘movements’ to a ‘noise generated by type’ basis is one, but presents as a political and operational nightmare. Dropping the catch-up ban and the curfew’s inflexibility would also help.

Far better would be to dump the cap altogether plus build the ‘Kyeema solution’ – a 1600m regional turboprop runway west of and parallel to 16R/34L. Placing its northern threshold abeam 16L’s would see no low approaches over houses.

Until the mythical second Sydney Airport is built there are few other viable options.

Bankstown’s masterplan does allow for 10 to 12,500 regional passengers a year in aircraft up to Fokker 100 size. But that doesn’t make much of a dent on Sydney’s currently 60,000 regional movements a year.

And no airline would want to operate peak overflow services to Bankstown to duplicate its Sydney services – that would be economic madness.

Richmond, should it be opened to civil access? Fog is a nightmare (10 times the incidence rate of fog as Sydney), it is miles from the Sydney CBD, and transferring passengers between Richmond to/from connecting flights at Sydney Airport would be a nightmare. n