MEL_Traveller
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2005
- Posts
- 27,922
2022 not sure how many flights or movements were still restricted by covid? And is that a true reflection of late 2023?55 is the maximum rate per hour, not the average rate.
I'm not sure what apples & oranges metrics you are using, but if you take MEL's monthly rate for September (19906), that's 27.6 moves per hour spread over 24 hours. Of course we know that traffic is minimal between 2200-0600, and will surge in peak periods, so there's not a constant flow of traffic throughout the day. During peak periods it is likely to get closer to 60 than to 30 per hour.
I can't find 2023 stats for Gatwick, but the 2022 total was 213034, making that 17752 per month, and 24.6 per hour.
I'd also like to note that although MEL has two runways, they are crossing. Crossing runways aren't twice as efficient as a single runway (like parallel runways are, ie SYD/BNE). Better than one, but not as good as two parallels.
There's also a huge assumption that MEL is the limitation here, which seems like a flawed assumption considering neither MEL or LGW have exceeded their pre-covid passenger records.
Don't blame the operational staff, they follow the standards in MATS (Manual of Air Traffic Services). Some of the standards in this document are over conservative, but that's imposed by management and the regulators, the latter of which are in the business of preventing accidents, and are less concerned with efficiency.
The figures for MEL I got from 2019, it’s a PDF and the link seems broken if I got to it from cache, but the figures were 221, 000 yearly movements between 6am and 11pm. My maths - which isn’t great! - works that to 33 movements per hour? In peak times. Total including off peak was 240,000
At gatwick the 2019 figure was 280,700, although they didn’t break that down to peak day vs overnight. departures between 11pm and 6am appear to be restricted by quota to ~14000 per year.
Like for like, taking out 11pm-6am, gathwick in 2019 handled ~266,000, MEL ~221,000. And Melbourne has at least one more runway.
So it might come down to just a two or three extra takeoffs and landings per hour, but multiply that by a year and tightening up the margins could have a significant impact.