200 km from Sydney to Sydney's new airport - Mr. Iemma cannot be serious! The rather remote Avalon is only 55km from Melbourne centre, Narita only 65km from Tokyo, and even Ryanair's much derided description of Hahn as Frankfurt only stretches the truth by 110km and has an autobahn from the front gate to city centre!!
Anyway,just why can't the existing site cope? With more runways than LHR (which has the parallels but no longer a crosswind r/way) surely the capacity is there? If it's a matter of terminals, then reclamation into Botany Bay would be a darn sight cheaper than building new elsewhere.
The sheer distance to Williamtown,the wrong side of Newcastle, makes the idea a joke - it takes an hour just to drive from central Sydney to Hornsby at peak times and then another hour and a half to the north of Newcastle (that's without allowing for the effect of extra traffic departing Sydney en route to the airport).
The assumption that there's going to be some sort of bullet train up north or magic road improvement seems unlikely when the existing Sydney railway system and the Pacific Highway can't be financed or fixed by successive governments. Looking at recent "remote" airport newbuilds like Narita,Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, a surface link has to be max 40 minutes. Or is the idea that after 23 hours from Europe, another 3 hours to the city centre won't hurt? Unfortunately the population spread in NSW isn't like Europe or parts of the United States (like DFW) where remote airports can be sited between large population centres and catchment areas. With respect to Wollongong & Newcastle, NSW international & interstate air traffic is almost all about Sydney.As far as NSW regional flying is concerned, passengers use it because it's quicker than driving, so shifting those flights to an airport 200km from Sydney is somewhat counter productive. Last but not least, it's hardly very "green" forcing passengers to drive or rail for extra hours even before they board their nasty carbon emitting planes.
By all means develop services from regional airports for their local catchment areas & so take pressure off the existing capital city airports, but the 4m Sydney market needs a better solution.
Last edited by Max Tow; 23rd Jul 2008 at 23:12.