The Airport Authority recently placed a number of newspaper ads looking to hire an executive director for corporate development. The main role will be to guide its overall development and spearhead its five-year plan, which is believed to centre around the strategic planning for the construction of a third runway.
To ordinary Hongkongers, another runway may seem like a necessity in the long run. But, to those who are familiar with the aviation business, such a proposal has blatantly disregarded the actual business context. This could certainly be described as a 'sky-high' project; not only would the scale of it be huge, the cost would be astronomical, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Such a high cost would almost certainly trigger massive public resistance similar to that met by the cross-border express rail link.
Before we have fully utilised the capacity of the existing runways by increasing the number of hourly aircraft movements, building another runway would be a waste of time and money.
At present, the two runways handle 58 aircraft movements per hour, which is below standard requirements. There is definitely room for expansion.
In 2004, the then-director-general of civil aviation, Albert Lam Kwong-yu, conducted a study into how to improve runway capacity. Even back then, he pointed out that the number of aircraft movements could be increased to 66 per hour in a few years.
Secretary for Transport and Housing Eva Cheng has hired overseas experts to assess our runway capacity. Their conclusion is that our airport already has the capacity to handle between 72 and 78 aircraft movements per hour. To make that happen, all we need to do is modify the current operational procedures and increase manpower.
But the current aviation head, Norman Lo Shung-man, insisted on boosting capacity by only two movements per year due to safety and manpower reasons. The goal of 68 movements per hour might not be reached until 2013.
