Hong Kong's role as air hub doomed unless third runway is built soon
For Hong Kong to remain as a regional hub, the government must proceed soon with building a third runway at Chek Lap Kok or risk losing out to rivals
Can Shenzhen airport and the other Pearl River Delta airports ride in like white knights to save the day for Hong Kong's increasingly congested Chek Lap Kok?
As environmental lobbyists continue to grab at any available straw to block construction of a third runway at the airport, it has often been claimed that airports in the delta can fly in to Hong Kong's rescue.
The longer the delay, the more severe will be the diversion of business activity
These lobbyists are not wrong to force the Hong Kong government to turn over every possible stone to find an alternative to building a third runway, which would be horribly expensive and the construction of which would inevitably result in inconveniences and dislocations.
But I can say with confidence they will find exactly what I found when I went through the same stone-turning exercise three years ago. The frustrating but consistent finding of the study I published in June 2011 - "Meeting future capacity challenges at the Hong Kong International Airport: Assessing the potential of alternatives to constructing a third runway" - was that we have no choice but to press ahead as speedily as possible with a third runway.
From as early as 2016, we face increasingly severe airport congestion, whatever temporary palliatives are discovered. The longer the delay, the more severe will be the diversion of business activity to competing regional hubs.
And I can promise you, I turned over every stone I could find: extending airport operating hours; increasing flights per hour from the current 60 to 80 or so; shifting flights to Macau or Zhuhai; collaborating with Shenzhen; and prioritising wide-bodied aircraft, as we were forced to do in the dying days of Kai Tak airport.
I combed the world for examples of neighbouring airports that collaborated with each other in air traffic management. I compared the five airports in the delta with the five surrounding London to see where synergies might be developed. Each avenue of investigation ran quickly into a dead end: