Canberra airport: the reno and beyond

Australia's capital city, Canberra, has had a facelift - at its airport. The four-year renovation was completed in 2013. It looks very different. Although I liked the appearance of the old airport and its easy-come-easy-go accessibility, I have grown to like the new look, that has been hailed a success.

An article in Monocle (issue 84, volume 09, June 2015) espouses many of the positive features of the renovated Canberra Airport. These include deliberately designed aspects, such as the open layout, mood lighting, central security screening, passenger drop-off zone, and wide views of the planes and landscape.

Instead of an orbital road to a passenger drop-off zone, as in most airports (where drivers enter one end, cross the terminal, drop passengers, and exit at the other end) Canberra Airport has an axial system which eliminates the long drop-off zone that leads to bottlenecks. The axial system has an upstairs passenger drop-off zone and a downstairs passenger pick-up zone in a courtyard garden with foundations and public sculptures.

Canberra Airport is a family business, bought from the Australian government in the 1990s. Currently the facility is operating under capacity at 3 million passengers, but it has the ability to cope with 10 million. Future plans include the Asian market and short-haul Trans-Tasman flights to New Zealand.

What the article omitted was that, whereas Canberra is the capital of Australia, there has never been any international flights. None. Canberra has never had an international flight. Crikey Canberra!

The airport was named the Canberra International Airport, but there were no direct international flights. A few years ago it announced flights to Fiji. International flights to Fiji. But this was a misnomer. I tried it in 2008 and the flight was to Sydney, changed planes, then onto Fiji. During the renovations from 2009-2013, the 'international' sign was removed. The Canberra International Airport became the Canberra Airport.

There were two main reasons for no direct international flights: (1) there was no customs service - and there still isn't, and (2) the runways do not cater for jumbo-jets. However, smaller Boeings are a possibility. Now that the renovations are complete, and business routes are successful, Canberra Airport can now look to the future, beyond the reno, to international flights.

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