One airport nearing capacity, the other underutilised.

It later announced plans to spend $NZ400 million ($A384m) upgrading Wanaka Airport from a small aerodrome into a jet-capable airport. It would manage both as one business in a complementary and supplementary arrangement benefitting both. QAC has managed the airport since 2009 and in April 2018, secured its lease for 100-years from the Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) for a sum of $NZ14.5 million (A$14.01m)

The two airports are only 27.8 nm (51.5 km) apart as the crow flies but the distance overland via a state highway that winds through a gorge or the Crown Range, New Zealand’s highest sealed road pass (sometimes closed in winter because of snow), is twice as long. Both airports sit within the border of the QLDC.

Pushing back

QAC chief executive Colin Keel said from the outset that the company felt a strong responsibility to consider all viewpoints shared in the consultation process and in striking the right balance between creating a sustainable platform for the long-term growth of air services to the region and the effects of such growth on its communities.

Initially support for the dual airports was positive, with the likes of the Wanaka Chamber of Commerce endorsing the move. Tenants at Wanaka Airport such as Jason and Kelly Buik, who have run their Heliport Services helicopter servicing business at the airport for 11 years said that growth couldn’t be stopped.

But as time has marched on since QAC’s first two community meetings in Wanaka in 2018 the QAC has faced a number of roadblocks, growing opposition from residents in both tourist towns and withering support. Even the QLDC, majority owner of Queenstown Airport and outright owner of Wanaka Airport, has pushed the QAC back at times.

Outcry

Last year QAC was forced to put its proposal for noise boundary extensions at Queenstown Airport on the backburner after a vociferous outcry from the public, a good many of whom have pricey lakefront houses under the proposed flightpath.

At the same time in Wanaka and the surrounding Upper Clutha region a maelstrom of discontent was brewing over the airport upgrade proposal and the dearth of information from the QAC.

Protect Wanaka, a stakeholder group of people from Wanaka and the Upper Clutha (taking in the towns of Luggate, Hawea Flat and Albert Town) was created, essentially opposing QAC’s plans to turn Wanaka Airport into a jet-capable airport. The group now has more than 3,000 members. The permanent population of Wanaka is around 7,000 and it attracts about half a million tourists each year.

In October last year Protect Wanaka applied to the Invercargill High Court for a judicial review into how the QLDC awarded a 100-year lease of Wanaka Airport to the QAC.

The council released the paperwork about the lease shortly before the October local body elections after repeated calls to do so from the group.

Protect Wanaka is claiming the QLDC has effectively transferred substantial ownership and control of Wanaka Airport, a strategic council asset, to QAC without consulting the community during its master plan process for the towns in 2016 and 2017.

Protect Wanaka chairman, Mike Ross, a former councillor at neighbouring Waitaki District Council and a Wanaka resident, has spearheaded the action as its chair.

A Protect Queenstown group also sprang up, giving solidarity to the Wanaka group.

Pause

Shortly before the October local body elections the mayor, Jim Boult, under fire from residents about the airport, announced he would pause the Wanaka Airport upgrade blueprint until consultants assessed the societal and economic effects of the two-airport proposal in a bid to “help achieve desirable community outcomes”. The report is yet to be published.

Boult, a former chief executive of Christchurch Airport, was re-elected as mayor in the council elections but with a reduced number of votes from Wanaka residents.

He has accused the Wanaka stakeholders group of scaremongering by linking airport development to “over tourism”, a trend many in both Wanaka and Queenstown believe has already happened to their tiny towns, particularly Queenstown where infrastructure requirements for tourists are under considerable strain.

Intent

Another snag in the dual airport plan momentum has been the QAC’s Statement of Intent (SOI) – the airport’s strategic three-year plan presented each March to the QLDC for approval.

‘A maelstrom of discontent was brewing over the airport upgrade proposal’

QLDC’s councillors twice rejected the SOI in June and August last year over a lack of clarity, forcing Colin Keel to take it back for redrafting. In December the council voted to accept it because of critical work requirements at the airport over coming months but there was a caveat that a steering committee of councillors and airport staff work together on issues in the SOI before 1 March 2020 when the next statement is due to be presented.

Air NZ

Even if the dual airport proposal is reignited this year there are other hurdles for QAC to overcome, not least what Queenstown Airport’s biggest client Air New Zealand feels about servicing a fully commercial Wanaka Airport. After being pressed last year for details QAC said there would initially be only a handful of flights to Wanaka, possibly using 60-seat ATRs alongside jets to Auckland. At this stage only domestic flights are being touted but an airport communications member let slip to some media last year that international flights could also be on the table for Wanaka by 2030, perhaps from Australia during the winter ski season but not with widebody jets.

Air New Zealand operated a 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D commuter service between Christchurch and Wanaka from 2004 to 2013 on its now defunct Eagle Air subsidiary but the service was axed because it was unprofitable.

Boult has said publicly that there had been growth in the region since Air New Zealand services last operated to Wanaka and that an upgraded airport would be servicing its own region this time round, not Queenstown’s tourist excess.

A report commissioned by Protect Wanaka from investment banker and Wanaka resident Richard Somerville assessed Wanaka Airport would need three million passenger movements a year to cover its costs and get an acceptable rate of return. This equated to one flight every 10 minutes in a 12-hour day or one every 13 minutes for a 16-hour day. Sommerville said a market return on the proposed $400 million investment required throughput of 3.14 million passengers, the equivalent of more than 500 flights per week carrying an average of 120 passengers.

The group has also released an animated attempt to visualise the possible Wanaka Airport of the future: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/wanaka/animation-attempts-visualise-possible-wanaka-airport-plan

Some light was shed on Air New Zealand’s feeling about the dual airport proposal in 2018 when a letter its chief ground operation officer, Carrie Hurihanganui wrote to QAC was leaked to media. She said Air New Zealand supported proposed noise boundary extensions at Queenstown but added that a new airport capable of supporting the future growth of domestic and international travel to Otago (the province including the Queenstown Lakes district and beyond), as well as appropriate transport solutions to disperse visitors to all Central Otago communities warranted investigation.

‘We need to resource visitor hubs accordingly, so that infrastructure which serves tourism and delivers GDP growth does not either starve or crowd out local communities’ CARRIE HURIHANGANUI

“Air New Zealand feels the new noise boundaries and the dual Queenstown-Wanaka option are insufficient to handle sustainable growth,” she wrote.

“We need to resource visitor hubs accordingly, so that infrastructure which serves tourism and delivers GDP growth does not either starve or crowd out local communities.”

Former Air New Zealand chief executive Christopher Luxon reiterated this view at the airline’s annual meeting later that year, saying “there needed to be a bigger, bolder conversation about creating a new Central Otago airport that could support Queenstown or Wanaka from a different location…..instead of taking a bandaid solution around the airport until things broke.”

He was not specific about location but both locals and outsiders, including pilots, have suggested Maori Point or the Cromwell basin south of Wanaka Airport as more suitable sites. Both these locations are within the Central Otago District Council boundary so any move in that direction would deny QLDC airport dividend income. QAC did not consider either of these locations in its latest fact-finding mission for the 30-year plan, unlike previous reports it and the QLDC have commissioned about other potential airport sites

Location, location

Wanaka Airport sits in a bucolic landscape 12 km from Lake Wanaka with the township on its shores Though the airport is bigger in land size than Queenstown Airport (due to a recent spending spree on farm land on the airport’s perimeter by QAC before it won the lease – in itself another contentious issue) it is basically a small, uncontrolled aerodrome hosting 11 general aviation, flightseeing, flight training, commercial helicopter, skydiving and aviation services businesses, the biennial Warbirds Over Wanaka Air Show and, occasionally, unmanned scientific research balloons launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The last quoted annual income from landing fees and rents in a 2015 consultation document was around NZ$230,000 (A$222,200). The airport is owned outright by QLDC.

Queenstown Airport is the country’s fourth busiest airport and has been rated in past global surveys as one of the world’s most spectacular for its takeoffs and landings between mountains. More than 60 businesses employing 700 people operate at the airport, servicing domestic and trans-Tasman flights by Air New Zealand, Virgin Australia, Jetstar and Qantas as well as business jets, helicopter operations and general aviation. It is owned 75.01 per cent by QLDC and 24.99 per cent by Auckland International Airport.

Exponential growth

When Queenstown Airport put its 30-year master plan out for community consultation in 2017 it reported 1.89 million passenger movements (comings and goings) through the airport in 2016. That figure accelerated to 2.378 million for the year to November 2019, up seven per cent on the previous year but the annual growth rate has been double digit for several years. Domestic demand slowed in 2019 with November’s figure of 149,978 passenger movements up four per cent on the same month last year while international passenger movements were up 13 per cent for the month to 55,256. New Zealand’s annual tourism growth, by comparison, is around five per cent.

The 30-year plan forecast growth of 7 million passenger movements by 2045, a figure that already appears out of date. It said at the time it would be able to comfortably handle 5.1 million passenger movements by then if a new taxiway and terminal were to be built and noise boundaries extended at Queenstown.

It has transpired since then the 2 million extra that could not be handled would go to Wanaka.

Noise ructions

Noise boundaries created over Queenstown Airport in 2009 were expected to suffice until 2037 but in recent years it was realised that would be much sooner.

Maps drawn up for QAC show them extending further over the northern end of the Lake Wakatipu and residential areas to the north and south, impacting 3,000 homes, four schools and a hospital but with a continuation of its noise-proofing of properties affected.

Early in 2018, in line with the Queenstown Lakes District Plan, the public was notified about the proposal to extend the boundaries to nearly double the present 21,000 maximum annual aircraft movement to 41,600 scheduled aircraft takeoffs or landings a year – equivalent to an average 114 flights a day. This would enable the airport to handle the projected 5 million “comfortable level” movements anticipated by 2045.

Residents were defiantly opposed. Their gripes about the disruptive aircraft noise were as much about tourist fatigue. They argued that visitors to tiny and hilly Queenstown (3.3 million visited by air and road in 2018) as well as the plethora of workers servicing the tourism industry were causing traffic gridlock and parking saturation. The permanent Queenstown population is around 24,000 and they carry the bulk of the infrastructure-funding burden through rates and other charges. Residents complain the town is creaking under the strain for the benefit of a transient visitor population.

Blindsided by a 94 per cent rejection of the noise boundary extensions from respondents to its online survey and submissions from individuals and groups, QAC was forced to withdraw the proposal but it has warned in its beleaguered statement of intent (SOI) 2020-2022 that the air traffic capacity of five million could be reached in five years without the extensions “with the expected effects being more limited flight choices and other changes in commercial behaviour”.

Colin Keel has said on more than one occasion the extensions will happen in one way or another, otherwise “the airport’s passenger capacity will become untenable”.

Demolish

Discontent over the noise boundaries, and effectively the airport’s location, reached a crescendo in April last year when around 250 people attended a meeting of the Kelvin Peninsula Community Association, a group of residents living on the southern side of the lake in the flight path of Queenstown Airport. Urban designers, David Jerram and Gillian Macleod presented a case to demolish Queenstown Airport and replace it with a residential and community hub of 5,000 homes for at least 10,000 people as a solution to the town’s acute housing shortage. They suggested the sale of the airport land could generate NZ$1-1.6 billion (A$0.97-1.55 billion) to fund a new airport elsewhere. Echoing Air New Zealand, there were no specifics about where “elsewhere” could be at the meeting but on their website flightplan2050.co.nz they have identified viable sites in the Cromwell-Tarras Valley as the most central to service the region’s communities – again all outside the QLDC council boundary.

Queenstown Airport’s 137.6 hectares and Wanaka Airport, with 282.4 hectares had a value of NZ$332 million (A$320.7 million) at June 30, 2018. The enterprise value of Queenstown Airport has been estimated in a range from NZ$466-$483 million (A$450.1-466.6 million), but that’s if used as an airport.

Boult, dismissed the idea of housing replacing the airport, suggesting a new airport elsewhere could cost at least NZ$1.5 billion (A$1.45 billion).

“And who would pay for that?” he asked.

Black star

Jerram and Macleod also raised aeronautical issues such as Queenstown Airport’s black star safety rating because of its short runway, its 90 m minimum legal runway end safety areas (RESAs), difficult landings due to turbulence and wind shear because of the mountainous terrain plus a high level of general aviation traffic serving tourism.

They also noted specific rules for Airbus 320 and Boeing 737 aircraft landing at Queenstown, including reduced crosswind and tailwind limits and only captains being allowed to control aircraft for takeoff and landing.

“Queenstown Airport will forever risk the potential that one serious accident could cause immediate restrictions placed by the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, the New Zealand Airline Pilots’ Association or any other agency to substantially impact its viability,” they said.

For now, it is a waiting game for consultancy reports, reviews to be done and airport plans to be finalised. For QLDC caught between its obligations to its ratepayers and the need for investment returns from the airports, it is a conundrum that only time and a concerted stakeholder engagement effort will resolve.

‘it is a conundrum that only time and a concerted stakeholder engagement effort will resolve’