Gasping for airports
After years of procrastinating over the site of a new airport, the time has finally come for authorities to put aside their differences and reach an accord.
As the airline industry in Poland experiences an unprecedented boom, Warsaw's Chopin airport is choked with more than double the number of passengers it was designed to serve. Despite current expansion work on Chopin, the need to supplement Warsaw's only airport has become a matter of great urgency. WBJ looks at the two possible locations for new airports and considers the arguments for building two facilities for budget carriers rather than one large-scale international airport.
With passenger numbers far in excess of what it was designed for, Warsaw's Frederic Chopin Airport is gasping for air. The airport, which was built to serve 3.5 million passengers a year, has seen a massive increase in traffic since Poland's entry into the EU and the introduction of low-cost carriers (LCCs) onto the Polish market. In 1995 the airport served 2.7 million passengers, in 1996 just over three million. In 2003, 5.1 million people passed through Okęcie (as Chopin is commonly known), and since then the number of passengers has been growing by around one million annually. Last year, the number of passengers flying to and from Chopin airport reached 7.1 million. "This year we will probably serve more than eight million passengers," says Artur Burak, a spokesperson for 'Polish Airports' State Enterprise (PPL).
Chopin Airport's new terminal, currently under construction, should bring some relief to the overburdened facility. Terminal Two, costing nearly $250 (zł.766.4) million and designed to handle 6.5 million passengers, will start serving incoming passengers at the end of November and departing passengers in April 2007. With both terminals operating, the airport will have capacity for 10 million travelers. "It shouldn't have problems serving 14 million passengers," adds Burak.
Still not enough
But even this might not prove to be enough. The airline boom in Poland is far from over. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), between 2005 and 2009 Poland will be the fastest-growing airline market in the world. The Civil Aviation Office (ULC) estimates that in 2010 the number of passengers passing through Polish airports will amount to over 22 million - nearly double the 2005 figure. By 2020 the number is expected to grow to more than 41 million.
Despite years of talk about building a new airport to serve Warsaw, nothing has been decided upon. Locations suggested include the former military airfield in Modlin, about 40 kilometers northeast of Warsaw, and an airfield in Sochaczew, about 50 kilometers west of the capital. Maciej Kalita, Plenipotentiary of the Marshal of Mazowieckie voivodship for Airports, claims that both locations should be developed, each with immediate capacity for around 1.5 million passengers. "According to my estimates, it would cost between zł.200-250 million to open one airport. So for zł.500 million we would have two airports," Kalita explains. In the long-term, both airports would be dedicated to LCCs and charter flights, while Okęcie would serve flag carriers.
Decision time
The new airports may be operating sooner than one might expect. According to Burak, at the beginning of November all the parties interested in the development of Modlin airport (that is, the Military Property Agency, Nowy Dwór municipality authorities, voivodship authorities and PPL) plan to meet and make the decisions necessary for the airport to get the go-ahead. These decisions include land-ownership issues, the question of how it will be managed by the airport management company and on what conditions the shareholders will form the company. The Civil Aviation Office has also said it would support the Modlin plan.
"If an agreement is reached in early November, then the airport could even start operating around Q2 of 2008," Burak said. The airport would be built on Modlin's existing military airfield. According to Burak, the basic infrastructure is already in place, making many development issues easier to carry out, but a great deal "needs modernization."
Modlin's transport connection with Warsaw remains a problem, but Burak says it can easily be improved. "National road number seven [Warsaw-Gdańsk] runs nearby, also there is a railway siding at the airport," he said. "It's not like we will be building everything from scratch in the middle of nowhere," he stresses.
But Modlin has a serious drawback. It is located near three large rivers and there are 17 national or scenic parks in the vicinity, which will probably limit the airport's future growth.
Good connections
The military airfield at Sochaczew has many of the same advantages as Modlin and could also be open in less than two years. "It is possible to open the airport, with a modern terminal and a modernized runway by the end of 2008 or at the beginning of 2009," the president of Lotnisko Sochaczew, Bogdan Zasada, told WBJ. The managing company's main shareholders are gmina Sochaczew, the city of Sochaczew and the Marshal of the Mazowieckie voivodship. Zasada wants to see EU funds involved in the project as well as some private capital, as a minority shareholder. "The private shareholder would operate the airport in the future," he suggests.
Sochaczew's location is cited as its greatest advantage. The A2 motorway will connect it with Warsaw by 2010 and a railway line between Warsaw and Poznań passes through it. There is also a rail track to the airfield itself. "We are already talking with the Mazowieckie voivodship about creating something like the Heathrow Express - a train which would reach Warsaw Central Station in 20-30 minutes," says Zasada.
However, there are some problems with land ownership, which is in the hands of the Military Property Agency, but Kalita claims that it shouldn't be an impossible problem to solve. "If planes land on former military airports in Kraków and Wrocław then I don't see why it shouldn't be the case in Sochaczew or Modlin," he says.
Three's a crowd
But some doubt whether Warsaw really needs three airports. "What would make sense is to have one airport which would be capable of supporting three different business models. Munich, for example, has a special terminal just for low-cost carriers," says Wolfgang Kurth, CEO of Advolar, a consulting company dealing with the airline industry, and former president of the European Low Fare Airlines Association (ELFAA).
Kurth adds that the costs of maintaining three airports would be very high, not to mention the inconvenience it would cause for passengers. "They would have to switch between different airports in different parts of the city," he says.
No time to dawdle
But officials in Poland say that there is no time left to wait. "We don't have time to build a new, large airport for Warsaw. We have to open the two airports to relieve Chopin Airport so it can function normally," Kalita says. Zasada claims that realistically it will take 15 to 20 years to build a new airport in a greenfield location in Poland. "That's a whole era. So for the next 20 years we are going to use the already overcrowded Chopin Airport?" he asks.
Kalita points to Ryanair's recent declaration that they could fly six million passengers to Warsaw annually. "Others also want to fly here. We can't base our assumptions on Chopin Airport's data. You don't know how many passengers would fly to Warsaw if we had more capacity," he says.
"I think Modlin and Sochaczew should be opened because that is what Poland's air traffic needs," Kalita concludes.
Low cost, big influence
Zasada points to another factor that LCCs frequently complain about - Okęcie's high fees. "The low-cost airlines, which will dominate the market for the next five years, will just force us to open a new airport. If not, we might find ourselves in a situation where airlines start playing a more active role in this field," he claims. There are already rumors that Ryanair is considering locating its new technical base in Jasionka near Rzeszów in southeastern Poland. Experts claim that this could be used as a bargaining chip to force authorities to open Modlin airport.
Sochaczew Airport's president points out that there are cities with more than one budget airport. "London has three low-cost airports and they are working fine. Warsaw can be a miniature version of that model," Zasada said.
Job magnet
Apart from the obvious benefits for air traffic in Poland that the two new airports could bring, there are also economic advantages. "Airports are real job machines," says the president of the rapidly expanding Munich Airport, Dr Michael Kerkloh. He explains that for every million additional passengers, between 800 and 1,000 jobs are created at the airport and another 800-1,000 workplaces in the vicinity of the airport. What's more, Kerkloh stresses, these are jobs that can't be exported to countries with lower labor costs.
"It's not only an employment multiplier, it's also an income multiplier," he adds, claiming that an airport helps bring business to a region and is a primary factor for a company choosing a location.
Kerkloh claims that since air traffic will undergo tremendous growth in Poland, it is correct to build infrastructure that will be able to meet the growing demand for the next 15 to 20 years. Zasada doesn't rule out the future development of Sochaczew into a large-scale hub. "If it transforms into a large international airport in the future, fine, but let's start with something," he says.
