JB, Sydney Airport report about future expansion.
Airport says the sky's the limit
What do you think about this from an international pilot's perspective?
Mostly gibberish. The letters cover some of the points.
Firstly, whilst I'm not a road designer, I've never seen a successful loop road where all traffic is directed past terminals that you don't want to use. The QF traffic shouldn't have to drive past Virgin, and vice versa. The first terminal invariably clogs up the entire road, as people (i.e. taxis) try to get from the far right lane to the left, at the last possible instant.
The curfew in Sydney is an issue. The airlines are rarely offered any relief from it, even when trying to recover from days of bad weather. Curfews can't just be considered in isolation. As flights travel around the world they have to fit in with curfews at both departure and arrival ends of the flight. That basically means there are large periods of the day, when flights can't depart (or arrive) from various destinations. For instance, you can't depart Sydney to London from about 8am to 3pm, because of the London curfew (which is a lot more relaxed than Sydney's). Going the other way, you can depart from about 9pm to 11pm, and then from 6am to about 2pm. Commercially some times are useless, and, you actually have to mesh the arrivals and departures together, otherwise you don't have an aircraft to use.
The upshot is that these empty periods at Sydney are empty for a reason.
But, if they were able to fill all the arrival and departure slots, which I'm sure is a Macquarie wet dream, the overall result would be chaos. Flights that were delayed would either be cancelled outright, or have to wait hours for slots to become available (this happens now in Europe...divert and the chances are that your crew will run out of hours waiting for a slot). So, have a thunderstorm in Melbourne, or fog in Sydney, and the ability to rebuild the schedules would simply disappear. And of course, those weather events never happen, do they?
The curfew should be relaxed for arrivals onto 34 and departures from 16. If the entails buying the entire suburb on the other side of Botany (whatever it's called), that would seem a small price. A second airport should be built, and not in some mythical far away land, connected by a fast train that nobody can afford to build/buy/use. There were reasonable options for a second Sydney airport, though the decades of procrastination have probably ruined them too.
(which we used frequently when at Disneyland at the start of our trip)
