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AIRPORT POLICY: THE GOOD AND THE BAD

Airports are important intersections in transport systems. It is here that passengers and cargo move from one mode of transport to another. Air freight is transferred to lorries or, less frequently, to the railway, passengers change from car or train to plane. In a modern, mobile society airports are an indispensable component of the transport system. But equally, they are constantly subject to criticism from their users.

Airports cannot adjust their capacity precisely in line with demand. Either they limp along behind, in which case the users complain about crowded terminals, slow check-ins and delays. Or else, having indeed prepared themselves for the future, they come under fire because runway and terminal capacity are far greater than passenger and freight volumes currently warrant.

Terminals cannot grow every year by a few percentage points in line with the growth in passenger numbers. They are planned and built with a particular passenger volume in mind. When Munich's Franz-Josef Strauss airport entered service on 17 May 1992, its terminal capacity was officially stated at 14 to 16 million passengers. Today the airport in Erdinger Moos is used by 23 million passengers per annum. Construction of a second terminal was unavoidable and, fortunately for the region, it was begun early enough, with an expected completion date of 2003.

Again, the example of Munich illustrates just how far-reaching airport decisions are. The airport was planned on the assumption that for a high proportion of its passengers Munich would be either the departure point or the ultimate destination. For this reason a long terminal was built, with relatively short distances between the car parks and the gates. No one suspected, however, that Munich would develop into an airport in which a large proportion of the passengers would merely be transiting from one flight to another. The result is that transfer passengers frequently have to walk a long way to get from one gate to another. The new terminal takes this into account, and is in fact designed for transfer passengers.

In other cities adaptation of capacity to actual demand does not proceed so smoothly. The re-building of Berlin's Schönefeld airport is a case in point. Problems arising from an invitation to tender that was open to legal attack combined with massive protests from the locals have meant that implementation of the necessary expansion programme is receding ever further into the future. Increasingly, some of those involved are beginning to doubt whether the expansion project will ever in fact get under way.

For Berlin and Brandenburg this would be a disaster, for Tegel is bursting at the seams and passenger volumes from and to the Berlin-Brandenburg region are expected to increase further in the medium term. This is assumed by all the air traffic forecasts, and in fact history has shown that forecasts invariably err on the conservative side.

The repercussions of airport policy are always long-term. If the right moment for a decision is missed, then the stream of air traffic will flow by. In the case of Berlin, passengers bound for Asia or America will then have to fly via Warsaw, Copenhagen, Frankfurt or Munich. This will provide little incentive to companies from those continents to invest in Berlin.

The German capital city had the chance to develop into a major hub. Yet one cannot help feeling that little has happened in recent years. If Berlin does not slowly move out of its present holding pattern and start work on rebuilding Schönefeld, the opportunity to become the European hub between East and West will have been squandered. For good.

From FLUG REVUE 10/2001, page 4