RUNWAY EXTENSION: IF CAPITAL BUILDS IT, AIRLINES WILL COME –
THE decision to proceed with a $300 million extension of Wellington Airport’s runway will have to be made without an airline locked to start operating long-haul flights to the capital.
Wellington City councillors were told yesterday that the city would have to show its hand first when it came to the proposed 300-metre extension because it was unlikely a long-haul airline would put serious consideration into adding the capital as a destination until the longer runway was a certainty.
Alex Welch, of aviation market consultants InterVISTAS, said it could take between six months and several years for an airline to evaluate a new route. If it did decide to fly there, those plans were rarely announced earlier than six months before the first plane arrived.
But councillors should not be scared by that, because his research had shown there were at least four long-haul routes that could be operated at a profit between Asia and Wellington.
He singled out Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai as the three destinations with the strongest potential for sustaining between three and seven weekly return flights to the capital by 2019.
Asia-Pacific was expected to experience the biggest growth in aviation traffic over the next 20 years, which would make Wellington a juicy proposition for airlines looking to enter the market, Welch said. ‘‘You guys are so well placed to tap into that growth.’’
Wellington’s demand for longhaul flights was currently just over 800 people day, each way, when taking into account all those living within a two-hour drive of the capital, Welch said
That meant there was greater demand for these long-haul in Wellington than in some other cities that already had those connections, such as Winnipeg in Canada and Belfast in Northern Ireland.
Deputy Mayor Justin Lester said a lot more would need to be known about the runway extension before any commitment was made to funding it. That picture would become a lot clearer in a week or so when the airport released about 20 more reports, including a cost-benefit analysis.
But the InterVISTAS assessment had given him some comfort that the demand to justify international flights between Wellington and Asia was already there. ‘‘What we now know, with a great degree of comfort, is that we can have direct flights already. So how long should we wait?’’
Lester said that while no longhaul airlines would publicly commit to Wellington before ratepayers wrote a cheque for the runway extension, there was the potential to get a closed-door agreement in place.
‘‘Those discussions have already started. We’ve had expressions of interest in the pas.
‘‘We’ll need a sufficient degree of confidence that if we do this then it’s going to be used, and if we don’t have that, then this won’t proceed.’’
But some councillors questioned whether a long-haul airline could decide on a whim to stop operating flights to Wellington if it didn’t turn out to be profitable.
They were told there was little to stop that happening, but that airlines generally did not enter a new market to begin with unless they were certain there was a profit to be made.