A second Sydney airport?

One more time, with feeling …

With the Australian government’s early May announcement that it will launch another “detailed investigation” on building a second Sydney Airport, this time at Wilton on the city’s south-western fringe, we may as well cue the music: the soap opera of the second airport is on again.

The plot lines of this long-running melodrama are instantly familiar, if not a bit tired. It begins with an alarming study predicting imminent air traffic doomsday at the airport – the most recent one released in March. It then moves to earnest and purposeful consideration of a suitable loca-tion for a second airport, which is where we are now.