Well, we should really titled our review “last week’s news” as we’re a day late to our usual news round-up. Nevertheless and assuming we’re forgiven, here are the news topics for this, eerrr last week:
- London’s fight for the next airport is heating up again
- Sydney airport worst Aussie airport
- World’s busiest airport soon to change?
It’s always fun to look back at a week of airport news and deciding which should be covered in our round-up. One topic that keeps coming back is the debate about the future of London’s large airports. This week London’s Mayor Boris Johnson went into attack mode again by setting out four potential scenarios for how the area in West London currently occupied by Heathrow could be re-developed and create homes for as many as 200,000 people, wrote the Telegraph. A few days later then, Boris Johnson’s aviation aide Daniel Moylan has insisted that a new Thames Estuary airport (Boris’ suggested location is shown in the graph above indicated with “5”) to replace Heathrow would not result in thousands of job losses. Although he acknowledged that around 145,000 Londoners were dependent on Heathrow for work, he said: “They would not lose their jobs – far from it.”, he was quoted in The Standard.
Down-under a different battle was fought this week when the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Sydney Airport (SYD) has again achieved the lowest ranking of the country’s four-biggest airports with passengers concerned about kerbside congestion at both its international and domestic terminals. In its annual report on the state of the airports, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission warned that the country’s four largest airports – Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth – will have to invest more if they are to resolve congestion, accommodate future passenger growth and improve service levels. This finding is contrary to Skytrax’ World Airport Awards based on consumer surveys which had Sydney Airport rank above the other 3 large Australian airports in its latest results.
And our last airport news coverage recap for this week comes from the United States. Well, it does, but only just. We’re of course talking about CNN’s report that Atlanta airport is still the busiest passenger airport in the world, but Beijing airport is closing the gap. According to the article more than 94 million passengers went through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) in 2013, a decrease of 1.1% over the previous year. Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) came in second place and is continuing to close the gap with Atlanta, reporting nearly 84 million passengers last year. That’s an increase of 2.2% over 2012. London’s Heathrow Airport (LHR) came third.
That’s all for this week. Safe travels!
[Graphic from Wikipedia – some rights reserved]