Latest news and insights from Australia’s airports

Matt Cocker: “The people who built the airport initially will be the ones that rebuild the airport”

It was a sobering moment at Hobart International Airport in March of this year – the day first since 1956 where no flights landed at Tasmania’s main aviation gateway. The devastating impact of COVID-19 would ultimately see the airport lose 98 per cent of its passenger traffic and flights to major market Melbourne reduce to just one a day providing essential services. But it was the day the airport fell silent that ...

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Health and Safety is top priority at airports as they prepare for increase in travellers

Perth Airport is not just ready to accommodate more passengers as soon as travel restrictions are lifted but it now has the accreditation to prove it can do it in accordance with strict global health standards. The West Australian gateway was the first airport in Australia and one of only a handful internationally, to get health accreditation form Airports Council International. Cairns Airport has since joined it in proving it has developed ...

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Canberra’s new alliance provides much-needed escape

A move by Canberra Airport to capitalise on the ACT’s strong record of suppressing the coronavirus has paid off with a cluster of new services by smaller airlines. The strategy was designed to cater for pent-up leisure demand from Canberrans as borders opened thanks to the city’s good COVID record. Beach escapes include destinations such as Port Macquarie and Ballina-Byron Bay in NSW as well as Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. The Alliance ...

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Solar power taking flight at Melbourne Airport

The biggest Australian solar power array of its type is set to be completed at Melbourne Airport by the middle of next month and will further boost the airport’s environmental credentials when it fires up. The massive 192,000 square metre array is the size of 10 soccer fields and its 17-gigawatt hours of annual electricity production account for about 15 percent of the airport’s annual consumption. That is enough to power all ...

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Nation’s major gateway funding a road to recovery

As continuing uncertainty about the coronavirus pandemic forces airports large and small to recast their plans, a $2 billion Sydney Airport equity raise aims to ensure the nation’s major gateway is prepared for all contingencies in what it describes as the most stringent travel restrictions in Australian history. Sydney Airport’s first equity raising since 2013 comes as optimism about a domestic revival has been dented by further border closures and as ...

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Sydney’s strategy to get Australia moving again

Sydney Airport is keen to take on a critical role in getting Australia’s shell-shocked tourism industry moving again with what chief executive Geoff Culbert describes as “a sustainable and scalable strategy”. The nation’s busiest airport moved quickly to protect its workers and balance sheet as government travel restrictions due to the coronavirus demolished 98 percent of its passenger traffic. It had been hoping COVID-19 would follow the track of the 2002 SARS ...

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Keeping fly-in, fly-out workers moving during COVID pandemic

With the nation desperate to limit the economic damage from COVID-19, Perth Airport has been working hard to keep essential resource industries operating smoothly in its vast home state. Ranked as the world’s biggest producer of iron ore and lithium and the second biggest supplier of liquid natural gas (LNG), Western Australia’s importance to the national economy is underscored by record 2019 resources sector sales of $163.7 billion. The need to keep ...

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New online marketplace provides solution for retailers

A 96 percent slump in passenger traffic that crippled retail sales at Brisbane Airport saw an idea that had been percolating in the background shift into overdrive. The concept of an online marketplace had been on the drawing board but had not been given a high priority. Covid-19 changed that when Executive General Manager Consumer Martin Ryan was forced into self-isolation and bought something online. Ryan had been spending long days talking to ...

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Resilience the focus as Melbourne Airport plans for the rebound

Melbourne Airport chief strategy and development officer Simon Gandy looks out at what just weeks ago was a thriving mecca of arriving and departing flights and sees a giant parking lot. The airport is now home to more than 50 parked aircraft and the circa 540 domestic aircraft movements for which it normally caters have been reduced to a similar number of flights. Passenger numbers are down from about 100,000 a day ...

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Parking planes in the time of COVID-19

It was a Friday evening when the first Qantas Boeing 737 flew into Victoria’s Avalon Airport to be parked as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. Airport chief executive Justin Giddings and his staff went out to watch with mixed feelings. “We were sort of excited that these aircraft were coming in and then when it landed and taxied in, all of a sudden it turned to sadness,” he recalls. “You realised that ...

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