Sydney Airport is eyeing a huge route network expansion. The privately-owned airport, Australia’s busiest and the world’s 46th busiest airport, held an investor briefing day late last week. Despite curfew restrictions and slot constraints, Sydney Airport’s management outlined plans to expand the number of destinations the airport is directly connected to.

The investor briefing held on Friday, December 6, 2019,  was reported on in Flight Global. In its report,  Rob Wood, Sydney Airport’s General Manager of Aviation, spoke of key opportunities existing in both underserved and unserved markets that could potentially be accessed using new fuel-efficient, long-range aircraft.

A range of underserved and unserved destinations

Sydney Airport has identified key underserved and new markets. The table below lists them in descending order alongside the number of passengers flying between Sydney and each destination in the year ending June 30, 2019.

Source: DIPD OAD Data via Sydney Airport

The top unserved route is a bit of a surprise

The top five underserved and unserved cities are in South Asia. The top unserved route is between Sydney and Kathmandu. This is an interesting one. Recently, Australia and Nepal signed a joint air services agreement opening up access between the two countries.

No airline has ever flown directly between the two cities and Qantas maintains it has zero intention to do so. Nepal Airlines indicated on its Twitter account last week that it was looking at Sydney. It is just shy of 10,000 kilometres between Sydney and Kathmandu. Nepal Airlines has a couple of A330-200s which have the range to make the flight.

So there have been three occasions in as many months when the possibility of air services between Kathmandu and Sydney have bleeped up on the radar. Is this mere coincidence or could there be the chance of something happening here in the next year or so?

India also focuses heavily amongst unserved and underserved destinations

India figures heavily amongst the top underserved and unserved markets out of Sydney. Qantas pulled out of India in 2012 and, despite noises from the airline about the importance and potential of India, hasn’t put its money where its mouth is in terms of planes on the ground there.

After an absence of several years, Air India resumed direct flights in 2015 between both Sydney and Melbourne and Delhi. And that’s it; that’s the extent of flights between Australia and India. On top of trade links, tourism links, and a large permanent Indian diaspora in Australia, over 109,000 Indian students are studying in Australian Universities.

Other significant underserved or unserved routes include Sydney - Dhaka (again the student numbers travelling between the two countries are large), Sydney - Busan, and Sydney - Phnom Penh.

Cities in the United States on Sydney Airport’s radar include Seattle, Chicago, and Las Vegas. Brisbane is about to be linked to Chicago via Qantas and the street corner chit chat is that Seattle is on the cards. Almost inevitably, once Qantas gets the aircraft with the range to fly between Sydney and these two US cities nonstop, poor old Brisbane will probably find itself with a few spare slots. 

Las Vegas is an interesting route. There’s a fair bit of passenger traffic back and forth, and airlines that fly between Australia and the USA have aircraft that can make the nonstop flight. But most of that traffic is leisure and MICE focused, not the premium heavy passenger traffic that full-service airlines want and need to make these long haul flights viable. It is telling no airline currently or ever has flown between Sydney and Las Vegas nonstop.

Other interesting destinations include Tel Aviv, Sao Paulo and Capetown. El Al is about to trial flights between Tel Aviv and Melbourne. If that works out, we might see El Al shift its attention to Sydney. Granted, Melbourne has a larger Jewish population but Sydney’s Jewish contingent remains substantial. No Australian carrier has ever shown interest in Tel Aviv.

There's a reason why Qantas doesn't fly to a lot of these destinations - and probably never will

Qantas touches on both Sao Paulo and Capetown as possible destinations in its marque Project Sunrise ambitions. But just 38,651 passengers travel annually between Sao Paulo and Sydney (or in another context, 743 passengers per week). If Qantas can’t be bothered flying to Mumbai, a route with more than twice the passenger traffic, I cannot see it sending half-empty A350s or Boeing 777s to Sao Paulo anytime soon, no matter how exotic Brazil may be.

The same problem applies to flights between Sydney and Cape Town. There are a significant amount of travellers between the two cities, just not significant enough to sustain scheduled flights.

Qantas has previously flown to Cape Town (albeit via Johannesburg). One of Qantas’ 747-400s could make the flight with fuel to spare in the tanks. But they don’t. Is a current market of just 20,000 odd passengers a year going to make Project Sunrise Cape Town flights viable? Unlikely.

I cannot see either of these destinations been served out of Sydney any time soon, despite Qantas publicly voicing the possibilities of doing so. Qantas, as most familiar with the airline know, has a habit of over announcing and under-delivering when it comes to things like this.

Indeed, the routes on Sydney Airport’s wishlist most likely to open up are those between Sydney and secondary cities in China. Chinese airlines have expanded rapidly into Sydney in recent years and continue to break ground with new routes. I would expect this to continue in the short to medium term. Many of the other destinations are pretty much wishful thinking. Even with new fuel-efficient aircraft, yields would be slim on flights to many of these highly price-sensitive destinations.

What do you think? What new routes out of Sydney would make sense? Post a comment.