This week’s been rather uneventful in the world of airport related news. Nevertheless we found a few interesting pieces for you regardless:
- Brazil’s airport project not fully ready for Wold Cup
- Berlin’s delayed airport needs more funding
- London City to be closed?
Okay, it’s been rumoured for quite a while but this week Forbes confirmed it when it wrote that the Viracopas International Airport (VCP) in the interior São Paulo city of Campinas will surely be opened for its usual flights, but its newest R$2 billion ($800 million) terminal will not be ready as promised. According to the article the terminals 28 points of embarking and new garage equipped to handle 4,000 cars is still in the works and won’t be handling domestic traffic. Only points for international passengers will be operational.
Another airport that hasn’t been ready for a long time now is Berlin’s new airport. This week the British Telegraph wrote that the long-delayed new airport needs a taxpayer-funded bailout of more than €1 billion, it has emerged, nearly two years after it was supposed to open.
Intended as a showcase for the city, Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) has instead turned into an embarrassing white elephant, mired in delays and extravagantly over budget. This is almost as much as its original budget of €1.2 billion. The article continued by saying that it was reported last month that only four per cent of the airport is ready, and the CEO of the company responsible said recently he couldn’t even give a proposed date for completion until the end of this year. A senior engineer warned it may not even be ready by an internal deadline of October 2016.
And if you thought our third headline was a bit shocking, it sure is. But if you paid attention you saw the question mark behind the sentence. It was again the Telegraph this week that reported the controversial suggestion: Despite occupying 500,000 square metres at the heart of London, London City Airport (LCY) has been criticised as “its direct contribution to the UK economy in 2011 was £110m – less than a fifth of the nearby ExCel Exhibition and Conference Centre.”, it wrote. The airport’s importance was questioned in a report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) – an independent think tank – which said it caters for only 2.4 per cent of London’s total flight capacity. The report suggests that the airport, on valuable land, should be redeveloped in order to build more homes for the capital and boost local businesses and passengers using the airport currently could use Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick instead. Controversial for sure, we think!
That’s all for this week – safe travels!
[Photo from Wikipedia – some rights reserved]