Second Sydney Airport
 

Had a chuckle reading this Age article Sydney second airport plans | Airport circus starts again as this same topic was being debated/procrastinated about when I first came to OZ on holiday 30 odd years ago. Later when I moved here (sorry Green Goblin, I ain't going back yet :p) and was flying jumpers at Pakenham, Victoria there was talk about a second airport being possibly built at Pakenham. I was told that this was originally a bomber airfield during WWII but has now been butchered and covered with bloody houses. Hope they have the same issues I had with the quadrillion flies that lived there. Maybe that is why Claude's C205 didn't climb that well; all the cylinder head cooling fins were packed with fly parts. :O

To the Dear Reader (sorry, North Korean joke) in this Forum, what IS the solution to the Sydney airport debacle? It really seems a bit stupid having a major Australian airport that has to close early.

There are some clever people on here so any sensible suggestions?

Nothing will change...noone has the political power to withstand the onslaught once they announce the location of a new airport.

Love some of the reader's comments about building high speed trains!! What do you reckon the environmental impact of demolishing 1000km of bush will be??:ugh: I wonder how that will be calculated in a carbon tax....

second airport hahahaha
 

While there are elections there will never be a second airport in the Sydney Basin. God how long has this been going on .I started playing with 'planes in 75. It was Wilton then, then Badgerys. Then again i think that real estate developers will put a halt building an airport on nice flat easy to build houses on type land.
If you want a second airport kick the army off Holsworthy and use that.
Claude just had his 84th last week. I think there's plans to eventually bronze him and stick him in the new APF building in Qld.

Oh great some more entertaining times ahead here. Australia is simply a backwater when it comes to fwd thinking re airports. We are such a small player in the scheme if things that the minority 'Ninbies' & idiot pollies have more clout than anyone with a common sense future plan.
From an overseas standpoint we must be looked upon as a bunch of local yokels when it comes to Aussies major gateway airport being severely restricted. Love to know how much extra uneeded carbon we fill our lungs with whilst holding due the restrictive nature of Syd's joke airport.

22+ Mill in a land roughly the size of the USA(mainland) means nobody takes too much notice of what we do & don't see us as a main player in the worlds future transport plans.

Location (If it ever went ahead)? Simple answer........"not in my backyard"

There's more to it than just a location. "IF" another airport where to be built then I'd bet my left one that it too would have severe restrictions & so goes the cat chasing it's own tail!

I look fwd to the interesting amusing reading to come, gives us something to talk about here other than poor T&C's


Wmk2

Political onslaught....
 

Easy solution:
If Liberal are in power just build the Airport in an electorate which is, and has always been, Labor. Oh yeah and put the flight path over Labor electorates too.

Now follow me through with this one….
If Labor are in power just build the Airport in an electorate which is, and has always been, Liberal. Oh yeah and put the flight path over Liberal electorates too.

The SIDs, STARs and DGAs will obviously need to be planned so as to stay within the appropriate electorate.
For instance: “SID - Mount Druitt Four Departure”….now that has a certain ring to it!!

In all seriousness, this is how it works. Things electorates get are dependent on what type of electorate you live in (Lib/Lab). So if you want attention (from pollies) move to a swinging electorate.

Pollies love to wheel this one out as a distraction when pushing something else through......what are they trying to sneak through? A change of government perhaps..a new tax perhaps...more immigrants....hmmm:E

Even better, build two airports. One in the Liberal electorate, the other in the Labor electorate. When the Liberals are in power, the Labour airport is open 24 hours and the Liberal airport is restricted (to politicians only, most likely). When Labor is in power, the Liberal airport is open 24 hours and the Labor airport restricted.

Which will come first the carbon tax or the second airport?

There will be a second Sydney airport at the same time as there is a second London airport.

Well there's Docklands, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted as well as Heathrow. Do you mean as well as those or another one?

The environmental approvals also make it really difficult to get a project of this size underway.

No matter where you plan to put it someone is guaranteed to find an endangered lesser-spotted-puking-frog colony somewhere on the site. Even if the frogs have to be trucked in by disgruntled locals in the middle of the night (not that that's ever been rumoured to have occurred in at least one proposed dam location :E) there is bound to be an environmental issue with any site you choose that kyboshes the whole thing. Couple that with noise objections from local NIMBYs and the whole thing just gets Way Too Hard.

While Sydney Airport limps along there's no political point in pushing a new airport, because it's currently a vote loser issue. This means that plenty of people would vote against you for proposing it, but you wouldn't get the same number of people changing their vote to vote for you because they support it. Therefore, it's not an issue that's worth running politically until the existing airport turns into such a debacle that people will support a candidate who offers a solution and will change their vote accordingly.
I don't disagree, but Heathrow has a curfew. I assume a number of other major airports do as well?

There is another force that hasn't been mentioned yet and that is the business community which in Sydney has enormous clout. During the 1960s' Australia's leading business city was Melbourne but there was a gradual shift during the 1970s' to Sydney - life style - weather and such things were perceived to be better and business was actively being enticed to move there and it worked.

Now, the hassles of negotiating Sydney airport and the general lack of infrastructure in a city notorious for its hedonistic lifestyle (i.e. more play and no, we don't want to pay for infrastructure) and the soaring property values are starting to make Melbourne look more attractive. For the well-heeled businessman it even has a nice corporate airport to park the runabout and its closer to the city than the main airport and it has a second airport to keep the riff-raff out of the way for when we have to slum it on a mainline airline.

Ben Sandilands has run an opinion piece on the relative merits of the two cities and so long as the howling unwashed continue to dominate politics Sydney will never get a second airport, something it desperately needs if it is to keep pace with the rest of the world, or even Melbourne.

As someone who flies both internationally and domestically as PAX quite often, I can't say I'm much of a fan of either SY or ML, they're both pretty crappy airports in the grand scheme of things. Especially the QF domestic terminal at ML.

Can't see Macquarie Bank pushing for a second airport?

Mac Bank are probably quite well cashed up to be able to buy into one anyway, no matter where its located......nothing like having THE monopoly....

Sad but prolly troo.....:(