Proposed changes to airspace at Bankstown Airport for WSI could severely impact general aviation in the Sydney Basin, the Royal Federation of Flying Clubs of Australia (RFACA) has warned.
Speaking to Australian Aviation, RFACA president Lachlan Hyde said Airservices Australia’s proposed “traffic levelling” and 3-minute departure spacing at Bankstown would reduce capacity by 37 per cent in peak windows, posing a “fundamental threat to the viability of GA and flight training”.
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“The practical bottom line for most pilots is students and private pilots. It’s more time sitting on taxiways, more waiting on the circuit, high fuel consumption, higher training costs, high flying costs, all that fun stuff,” he said.
“In numbers, basically two out of every five peak hour planes are grounded, and if you extrapolate that to movements throughout the year and so on, it’s the equivalent of closing Bankstown for around 135 days a year.
“So there are ongoing impacts across much of flight training and across that entire ecosystem, which then flows through to the entire workforce.”
According to Hyde, the proposals, which he says are due to a lack of resources in personnel and equipment at Airservices, would create a bottleneck for flight training at a time when the industry needs more than 11,000 new pilots.
“According to 2024 data by movements, it was the fourth busiest airport in Australia, behind Sydney, Melbourne, and I think Moorabbin overtook them. So it’s one of the main ones in Australia. There are a lot of flight training organizations based here,” he said.
“Unfortunately, there are not many places where people can pack up and flee if Bankstown becomes unsustainable – it is a perfectly designed airport from a training perspective.
“They can’t just pack up and move to Camden, Wollongong, Bathurst or anywhere else without stifling existing traffic across the board.”
In RFACA’s submission to Airservices’ industry consultation, the organization suggested that Airservices divide Sydney’s airspace into three sectors following the three geographic corridors radiating from Bankstown and Airservices’ proposed new VFR lanes.
“All we’re asking, logically, is that they have three separate checkpoints to match their design. So, have a north access, a west access and a south access,” Hyde said.
“If they then want to do their three-minute spacing, if they can do 20 departures from Bankstown in an hour with one man, if we have three, then that would hypothetically mean we could get 60, which would slightly exceed current capacity, but that would be the limit.”
Australian Aviation understands Airservices’ position is that the proposal is not driven by Sydney Traffic Control Unit (TCU) staff and is not intended to reduce overall capacity at Bankstown Airport.
“No decision has been made on Airservices’ traffic leveling proposal at Bankstown Airport,” an Airservices spokesperson said.
“We will consider all industry comments on the proposal and respond to interested party submissions once the consultation has concluded.”
Industry consultation for the proposal closed on March 8.
