Sydney's A$5.6 Billion Airport Opens With Six Flights a Day at Most
SYDNEY — At 11am on Sunday, a Jetstar Airbus A320 will leave Badgerys Creek for the Gold Coast, and Australia's first new greenfield airport in more than half a century will finally carry paying passengers. Flight JQ362 is also, for the time being, close to the entire commercial schedule.
Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) opens to travellers on 25 October, eight years after construction began and after decades of political argument about whether Sydney needed a second airport at all. The Commonwealth owns the site outright; the bill came to A$5.6 billion, or about US$4 billion. The single terminal and its 3.7-kilometre runway are built for 10 million passengers a year in the first stage.
Aviation data firm Cirium, cited by Bloomberg, counts half a dozen or fewer scheduled passenger flights a day for the next 12 months. Six carriers have committed: Jetstar, Qantas, Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines, Vietjet Air and Fiji Airways. Jetstar, Qantas's budget arm, does most of the work: up to 14 weekly flights to Melbourne, a daily Gold Coast service and three a week to Brisbane.
Qantas itself does not arrive until 28 March 2027, with four weekly flights each to Melbourne and Brisbane; across March to September next year its domestic schedule averages barely more than one departure a day. Virgin Australia, the country's second-largest carrier, has published no schedule at all. Carriers are trimming domestic capacity rather than adding it, and new aircraft are hard to obtain, leaving little spare metal for an airport where demand is unproven.
Air New Zealand starts three weekly return services to Auckland on 26 October. Singapore Airlines begins a daily Changi flight on 23 November. Vietjet plans two weekly rotations to Ho Chi Minh City from 9 January 2027, rising to three in March, and Fiji Airways adds three weekly Nadi flights from 19 March. For the first month of operation, in other words, there is no long-haul network to speak of.
Access is the bigger problem. The Sydney Metro line built to serve the airport will not carry passengers until 2027 at the earliest, with 2028 flagged as a possibility. Until then, travellers face a privately run coach: A$55 and roughly an hour to the city centre, A$25 to Parramatta, A$65 to the old airport. A free bus shuttles to St Marys station every 30 minutes. Kingsford Smith, by contrast, is 20 minutes by train or taxi from the CBD, and remains the practical choice for most people. "The main airport is much more convenient to almost all travellers," said David Levinson, a transport professor at the University of Sydney, who called the new airport's forecasts "a bit optimistic".
The federal government frames the project as regional policy as much as aviation. Infrastructure Minister Catherine King said the doors were about to open to passengers and that the project "has always been bigger than an airport", connecting Western Sydney to the world. The government says construction supported more than 12,800 jobs, roughly half filled locally, and the airport's operator notes that more than a million people have moved into the region since 2016. Chief executive Simon Hickey describes it as the most consequential piece of infrastructure in Sydney since the Harbour Bridge.
Cargo has been flying since 27 July, with Qantas Freight running about a dozen freighters in and out overnight from Monday to Thursday. Because the airport has no curfew, it becomes the city's outlet for unrestricted night movements from 1 November, taking overnight freight away from Kingsford Smith. That cargo base, rather than passengers, is what the business case rests on for now.
The master plan expects 8.4 million passengers a year by the end of the decade, almost 20 million by 2045 and 82 million by 2063, when it is meant to become Sydney's primary gateway. None of that is decided by Sunday's ceremony. "Right now, I'm really happy with where we're sitting," Hickey said, before adding the line that matters more: "It's use it or lose it."