The vision thing

Maybe it’s a good thing that Sydney Airport is restricted by an 80 aircraft per hour movements and hour cap and a curfew. I know modelling shows Sydney can handle more like 100 movements an hour but most of the time it seems like Australia’s biggest airport is running at effective capacity now, and would struggle to handle more traffic.

There’s no doubt many of Sydney Airport’s constraints are artificial, not just the rigid enforcement of the curfew but the strict application of the cap where 80 movements an hour means no more than 80 movements each hour rather than an average of 80 over the whole day, which makes recovery from delays painfully slow.

But the fact that Sydney Airport seems to be bursting at the seams, in part because of artificial constraints, points to a bigger problem – government policy settings for aviation that have allowed this situation to occur.

It’s interesting to reflect that in Australia that aviation policy, such that we have, is reactionary and lacking in vision. On the other hand flying through Asia, especially hubbing through Hong Kong International, highlights just how good an airport, and its associated infrastructure, can be.

Hong Kong is a good case in point. When the old Kai Tak airport was approaching capacity constraints, the Hong Kong government elected to build a new replacement airport rather than building a second, complementary airport that doubtless would have been less popular with passengers and airlines, and would have broken home airline Cathay Pacific’s hub and spoke operation.

Instead Hong Kong flattened two islands and reclaimed more than nine square kilometres of land from the sea to build a brand new, much larger airport 30km from the centre of Hong Kong and shut the old airport down.

And to compensate for the effect of moving the airport 30km away, Hong Kong built supporting land infrastructure including the two-deck Tsing Ma suspension bridge and a series of road and rail tunnels, and the Airport Express train whizzes from the airport to central Hong Kong in 25 minutes As Sydney approaches capacity though, we will build a new secondary airport, pitched as an airport for western Sydney rather than Sydney as a whole.

It’s infrastructure that will determine if Western Sydney is positioned for success. JETSTAR’S DAVID HALL

Of course Hong Kong’s airport and supporting infrastructure was built at a massive cost. Indeed at HK$160 billion (something like $24-30 billion) it was the world’s most expensive airport project when it opened in 1998.

At an estimated $2-3 billion, Badgerys Creek won’t be anything like that. For a start, while its construction is touted to involve Australia’s largest earthmoving project, Sydney’s second airport has nothing like the geographical constraints Hong Kong faced.

But moving mountains aside, it won’t be anything like that cost and scale because we are building incremental airport capacity to initially complement Sydney’s Kingsford Smith. And that will always be the challenge for a Sydney West Airport in its early years, particularly if we skimp on the landside infrastructure that makes getting to Hong Kong International such a breeze – that it mainly attracts a few low-cost carriers and freight airlines as overflow capacity from KSA.

Avalon Airport’s struggles to attract airline customers and remain viable as Melbourne’s second airport highlights the difficulties hard-to-reach secondary airports can face.

As Jetstar Australia NZ boss David Hall told a recent conference: “It’s infrastructure that will determine if Western Sydney is positioned for success – or left to chance. ” That getting to and from Sydney Kingsford Smith, whether by car, taxi or train, is bad enough, at only 8km from central Sydney, should be a salutatory lesson.

As Hall said, “All the global evidence suggests that this airport will need integrated road and rail links from day one, if it’s to sustain commercial levels of demand. ” The lack of vision for what Sydney West could be, and how Sydney’s existing and new airports are not being thought of as a system points to the new airport’s likely early struggles to get established.

Build it carefully so that they – airlines and their passengers – come.