New Zealand airbridges for Sydney’s new airport
A Lower Hutt manufacturer is building the airbridges for Sydney’s new international airport, which is expected to open in 2026 and operate as an economic centre.
J&D McLennan Engineering is supplying 13 airbridges for Western Sydney International Airport, which is one of a few greenfields airports being built around the world.
“It’s quite a unique situation,“Duncan McLennan, managing director of the family firm said.
Nine of the glass-sided bridges have already been delivered to the construction site, ready for installation. Another two are due to be shipped within the next month.
“So we've almost finished all the fabrication, then it is a matter of installing”, which was expected to be completed about September, McLennan said.
The work was worth millions of dollars, but the exact value was a commercial secret.
The airport, about 50km from central Sydney, is expected to open in late 2026 and includes a planned economic hub, or aerotropolis, to be built at nearby Bradfield. A driverless metro railway line is also under construction linking the airport to Sydney.
Air travel in Sydney was expected to double over the next 20 years, and the existing Kingsford Smith Airport would not be able to meet the increased demand, according to the Australian government.
The first phase of the new airport will cater for up to 10 million passengers a year. That compared with about 16 million that pass through Auckland Airport. But Western Sydney is expected to double in size as demand grows, including a second runway and massive transport infrastructure.
The airbridges for the airport are the largest J&D McLennan makes, with a maximum telescopic extension of about 45 metres. They will cater for all jet aircraft, from the giant Airbus A380 down to domestic workhorses such as the Boeing 737.
It was a big contract and in line with some others in the the company’s history of building airbridges that went back to the 1970s, MacLennan said.
It took about three weeks to build each airbridge. Once completed they were trucked overnight to Auckland and put on a specialist ship, bound for Sydney.
Finding qualified workers had been a issue, particularly in the wake of the Covid pandemic. When work for the Western Sydney order began at the end of 2022 there was a shortage of tradespeople, such as welders and machinists with the skills needed to fabricate the complex bridges, he said.
About 40 people were employed in the workshop, including migrants from Indonesia, but the company was looking to hire more skilled operators and technicians, as well as managers, he said.
“It's very hard to get labourers these days, there's just no people around, or people don't want to work.”
All airbridges at New Zealand airports came out of the company’s workshop, along with about 60% of bridges in Australia, as well as around the South Pacific.
The main competition came from China where manufactures win contracts on price, but not necessarily on quality, he said.
J&D McLennan has a long history of doing business in Australia. It supplied and maintains all the airbridges at Kingsford Smith Airport, about 60 of them, and has a team of 10 maintenance workers keeping them going.
Two airbridges were recently delivered to Papua New Guinea and McLennan said there was likely to be more demand in the South Pacific as airports developed, as well as Auckland Airport’s planned domestic terminal development.
“And there's a number of other projects in Australia, which are hovering in the background, that were put up during Covid but are now starting to come back to life again,” McLennan said.