Currently, Australia’s fifth busiest hub, Adelaide Airport (ADL) says it has “genuinely realistic” plans to host non-stop flights between Adelaide and 37 major cities around the world.
Among the destinations in ADL’s Network Vision 2050 plan are New York, London, New Delhi, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg and Santiago.
Closer destinations include New Zealand’s South Island, parts of Asia without direct connections, Japan and China (with which ADL was linked previously via China Southern Airlines).
While some of these destinations – particularly the ultra-long-haul routes – are a long way off, they’re still ambitious, given the costs involved in making them happen.
According to The Advertiser, Adelaide Airport general manager Brenton Cox said it would cost “over $2 billion” to operate a new direct service between the South Australian capital and North America, for example.
“If you want a daily service you need two and a half aircraft, that’s over a billion dollars of just kit,” he explained.
“And then every year you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars of fuel and then hundreds of millions of dollars of people cost, so you’re investing effectively over $2 billion to start a new dot on a map – and you’re flying over a current hub (such as Sydney).”
ADL-LHR non-stop?
Of a potential non-stop flight between ADL and the UK, Cox said “it is not entirely crazy that one day we will be connected direct to London”.
“This is 2050 – you show this to some people and they choke on their cornflakes,” he remarked.
“But this is not just made up dots on maps. This economic modelling is linked with what we know about aircraft technology orders over the next two to three decades, so all of this is genuinely realistic. And they’ll all come on board at different times.
The airport’s strong post-pandemic rebound has helped fuel this optimistic outlook.
By December, domestic capacity had returned to nearly 90 per cent of 2019 levels, while international capacity had returned to around 70 per cent in January.
“The good thing is everything is heading in the right direction,” Cox said.
Among the international carriers to have resumed flights to Adelaide are Qatar Airways, Singapore Airlines, Air New Zealand, Malaysia Airlines and Fiji Airways, while the ADL boss believes Emirates and Cathay Pacific will also return at some point.
All of this spells good news for both inbound and outbound tourism.
