Bankstown airspace changes could hit GA hard, aero clubs warn

“The practical take-home thing for most pilots is the students and private pilots. It’s more time sitting on taxiways, more holding in the circuit, high fuel burn, higher training costs, high flying costs, all that fun stuff,” he said.

“In numbers you’re looking at essentially two out of every five aircraft in peak hours being grounded, and if you extrapolate that over the movements over the course of the year and so on, it’s the equivalent of closing Bankstown for around 135 days a year.

“So there’s flow-on impacts to a lot of particularly flight training and that whole ecosystem, which then flows onto the entire workforce pipeline.”

According to Hyde, the proposals – which he says are due to under-resourcing in staff and equipment at Airservices – would create a bottleneck for flight training at a time when the industry needs more than 11,000 new pilots.

“On 2024 data by movements, it was the fourth busiest airport in Australia, behind Sydney, Melbourne, and I think Moorabbin just pipped them. So it is one of the core ones in Australia. There’s a large number of flight training organisations based here,” he said.

“Unfortunately, there’s not very many places that people can pack up and run away to if Bankstown becomes untenable, it’s a perfectly designed airport from the training perspective.

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“They can’t just pack up and move to Camden or Wollongong or Bathurst or wherever without choking out existing traffic across the board.”

In the RFACA’s submission to Airservices’ industry consultation, the organisation has suggested Airservices split Sydney airspace into three sectors following the three geographic corridors radiating from Bankstown and Airservices’ proposed new VFR lanes.

“All we’re asking for, logically, is that they staff three separate controller positions to match their design. So, have an approach north and approach west and an approach south,” said Hyde.

“If they then want to do their three-minute spacing, if they can fit 20 departures out of Bankstown in an hour with one guy, if we have three then that would hypothetically mean you could get 60, which would slightly exceed capacity today, but that would be the limit.”

Australian Aviation understands Airservices’ position is that the proposal is not driven by Sydney Traffic Control Unit (TCU) staffing, and is not intended to reduce overall capacity at Bankstown Airport.

“No decision has been made on Airservices’ Traffic Levelling Proposal at Bankstown Airport,” an Airservices spokesperson said.

“We will consider all industry feedback on the proposal and respond to stakeholder submissions once consultation has concluded.”

Industry consultation for the proposal closed on 8 March.