The Canberra Airport Group appears on the verge of realising its long-held ambition of staging regular international airline flights into and out of the nation's capital. Reports, still unconfirmed, suggest that next week, Singapore Airlines chief executive Go Choon Phong will announce the inauguration of four weekly flights from Singapore and Canberra, continuing onward to Wellington and then returning to Singapore via Canberra. It's rumoured the airline will use Airbus A330-300 aircraft, which seat around 285 passengers in a business/economy class configuration, equating to a weekly capacity, potentially, of around 1500 seats.
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For Singapore Airlines, the new route is an opportunity to expand its Changi hub and to further capitalise on the increasing numbers of Chinese coming to Australia for business or pleasure. It might even enable the airline to claw back a percentage of the Australian airline passengers who once routinely flew to Singapore and to points beyond but who now largely travel to Europe via Middle East hubs such as Dubai. For the airport's owner and the ACT government, the coup is of far greater significance.
Since buying the airport lease from the Commonwealth in 1998, the Canberra Airport Group has lengthened and upgraded the north-south runway to handle larger, heavier aircraft, replaced the old terminal with a new enlarged facility (incorporating dedicated customs, immigration and quarantine areas) and more recently partnered with Vibe Hotels to build a hotel next to the new terminal.
The ACT government, which believes international services could generate up to $50 million in annual benefits to the Canberra region and create as many as 400 new jobs, has been busy too, talking to Singapore Airlines and Air New Zealand, among other airlines, and foreign governments.
If regular overseas flights to and from Canberra airport do eventuate, the timing is ideal. Jet fuel prices are the lowest they've been for many years, the number of hotel rooms in the territory continues to expand, and Badgerys Creek airport – the nearest thing to a threat to Canberra's future as a thriving airport – is still a long way from an official start date, let alone a completion date.
It would be a mistake to assume, however, that once an overseas operator sets up shop in Canberra, they'll be here for the duration. Economics will determine that. Hobart airport, which serves a catchment of roughly Canberra's size, offered international flights to New Zealand in the 1980s, but Air New Zealand, abandoned the service in 1998 due to disappointing patronage. Singapore Airlines, too, has terminated destinations such as Darwin and Cairns as a result of poor ticket sales.
It's fair to say that when it was sold to businessman Terry Snow in 1998, Canberra airport's potential was not obvious to all. Certainly the price was low by comparison with other capital city airports sold around the same time. But the extensive, and impressive, upgrades that Mr Snow and and son-in-law Stephen Byron have engineered in recent years has transformed it. Now, with overseas flights apparently about to begin, the airport's potential is close to being fully realised.
