Major terminal realignment proposed for Sydney Airport

We were waiting for a while for some indication of the direction the new executive team at Sydney Airport would take.

With the old Macquarie Airports (then MAp) reshaping itself by the shedding of overseas interests and the rebranding of the company as specifically Sydney Airport the focus is complete.

But today’s announcement that Kerrie Mather and her team are working towards a significant realignment of terminal use is more than tweaking at the edges.

This is genuine vision, with the potential to extract more efficiencies from the infrastructure while working within the politically imposed operating restrictions.

The core of the announcement is the consolidation of all of the Qantas Group operations (and those of its alliance partners) into one terminal area, while doing the same with Virgin Australia and its partners at the other terminal precinct.

Qantas would get to work with T2 and T3, while Virgin Australia (and its partners) would share T1 with the other non-aligned international carriers.

The fate of the Tiger and the regionals is less clear, with “the precinct from which domestic and regional carriers… will operate (to be) the subject of consultation”.

There’s also some maintenance facility aspects, with Qantas to get a new line maintenance set up that will enable it to pull down the current hangars that create traffic congestion at T3.

And Virgin will have the dedicated maintenance base that has previously been flagged.

Under the proposal, which appears to have the enthusiastic but qualified support of the two airline group CEOs, this will all happen by 2019.

How neat is all that? It is possible to achieve within the land-use guidelines already stipulated in the 2009 Master Plan. And it is expected to happen “within the framework of Sydney Airport’s existing debt financing policies…”.

Now comes the tougher bit: “broader external stakeholder consultation… engaging proactively with all airline partners, airport related businesses, border agencies, regulatory authorities, local, state and federal governments and the community…”.

The vision is first class, but as we’ve have seen with so many other aspects of the evolution of Sydney Airport turning it into a reality is not going to be easy. And perhaps that 2019 goal is a tad ambitious.

Nonetheless the proposal deserves ardent support. It could even provide sufficient synergies to push any second Sydney airport requirement out by decades.

And it might even be the stimulus for the NSW State Government to at last get its act together and do something about the ground infrastructure connecting the Airport to the CBD.

The only people who might feel a bit miffed are those behind the Rydges Hotel project at T1 which was only announced last month.