oneworld to shift to new mega terminal? [Beijing]
 

Beijing's new airport approved: airlines to be split by alliance
By John Walton 21 Jul, 2011 http://www.ausbt.com.au/beijing-s-ne...es-by-alliance
Moderator note: Balance of article removed due to TOS prohibition on including full text of copyright material in posts. For full text, please refer to link above, still active as of today (9 Aug 11).

Gardyloo
Oneworld moderator

I do not think CX/KA will move to a different airport from CA, given there is a JV on the PEK-HKG route.

It sounds like typical Chinese way of doing things but I do agree that capital airport is too congested.

Whenever the plane taxi for take-off, there's always a long queue!

ETA? 20 years? More?

If they can build a high speed rail network criss-crossing the nation in less than a decade, the new airport will also go from blueprint to opening tape-cut ceremony in less than five years.

Whether it'll be safe will be another matter. :D

2 years is my bet. 5 years is too long for the Chinese.

It's not just a new airport, it would be the largest airport in the world. 8 runways, 400 million passengers?!?!?!

And this may be the shortest thread in the world. Who is going to be carrying all these passengers out of Beijing? Is a new airline going to make Beijing South its hub.

Air China plans to have 400 aircraft by 2020 that along with Hainan's expansion and futher growth by other airlines should be able to fill up that airport

PEK's latest expansion was ~3 years ago and it is already running at close to 100% capacity.

You are correct but you are missing my point. Air China will not be using Beijing South as its hub according to the article.

Hub or not, if they build it, you can bet that CA be there on day one in a major way.

China better come up with a solution for easy transfers in between multiple city airports. Its starting to become a big problem all around China.

If they come with a solution that is not rail then they may be able to sell it to other countries.

Why split between two airports? The govt there has had practice displacing millions of people so I'm surprised they didn't go "Three Gorges Dam" style and build a ultra-mega airport in one location.

Yeah... splitting an airport this big sounds like hell unless they keep it alliance separate. You are going to need to move 1,000s and possibly 10,000s of passengers in between to two airport every hours.

First of all, I don't think inter-airport transfers are especially relevant. Bear in mind that PEK is the second busiest airport in the world; we have flights to many , many destinations.

The issue is that there aren't any more daytime landing slots, and those flights tend to be full.

The city planning people have known that additional airport(s) were going to be required for ~10 years. There had been talk about converting a military airport or two to accommodate commercial service; Nanyuan, in particular, received a lot of attention because KN already uses it, but the road infrastructure in that area is dreadful.

Until this recent news broke, my money was on a site (near Epoch City) between BJ and Tianjin along the train route because that would have served both markets and supported BJ's southward development ambitions.

Just to provide a bit of history, apart from downtown, the NW part of BJ (Haidian) was traditionally considered the most desirable based on its positive fengshui (there is more water up there and the winds tend to come from that direction); that's why most of the universities are up there.

Meanwhile, Chaoyang became desirable during the 1980s because it was opened to foreign investment first (much like Jing'an in Shanghai).

The south, by contrast, was largely ignored and looked down upon.

Well, the times are a changin'. Build a $X billion HSR project with its terminus at South Stn and the largest airport in the world, and you can bet your bottom dollar that massive development will follow. As of now, there is minimal subway coverage in the south, but the worker bees are doing their best to change that:

http://www.beijing-travels.com/beiji...way/plans.html

Even though both the existing airport and the proposed airport are both technically in Beijing, I think it's conceptually easier to think of them as being on opposite ends of an enormous metropolis, similar to SZX/CAN or BWI/IAD.

I'm sorry for the long winded post, but I find this stuff fascinating. What's more, I've been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to witness this city/country transform from abject poverty into the land of iPhones and Ferraris during the course of the past 1.5 decades. While I realize that the bubble could burst at any time, thus far, things have pretty much adhered to the "5 Year Plans" to a tee (that failed Maglev experiment in SH, notwithstanding).

In a perfect world people would connect out of the same airport. The sad thing is airlines try to exploit the pricing and travellers are not willing to always pay the extra to connect in the same airport meaning you are going to need a good way to connect the two airports. Disagree? How many passengers heading to Hong Kong fly to Shenzhen?

Yes, I do. PEK is an O&D airport (for 99% of pax) and I expect the new airport will fall into the same mold. This is a little different from the Shanghai case, in which PVG handles most international flights and SHA is mostly domestic, but not that much different because there aren't a whole lot of inter-airport transfers in Shanghai (i.e. most places you'd want to transfer to are accessible via NRT or ICN).

In the case of Beijing, the proposed airport is far enough away from PEK that few people would dream connecting between the two, but that doesn't matter because both airports will serve the same destinations. For the most part, the "hub" concept doesn't apply in either case; no sane person would connect in Beijing (or Shanghai) in the absence of other options.

Shenzhen is a better case example. SHA has too little flights to be of competition to PVG for connections.

Shenzhen runs connections to Hong Kong airport. People fly into SZX then connect to an international flight from Hong Kong. Or vice-versa.

People still keep on doing it because they want to avoid the flying into Hong Kong tax.

The business decisions of the airlines to maximize profit could cause a similar thing in Beijing. Don't want to spend 2 hours transiting through Beijing? Fine pay us an extra 300 rmb and we will let you connect in the same airport. Airline bosses are probably already planning their pricing structure to advantage of two MAJOR airports in Beijing.

Maybe I am pessimistic because I see the numbers who fly to SZX just to get to HKG. But I don't think I can trust the airlines not to take advantage of this.

As you must know, one of the main reasons HK is more expensive is because its government charges higher taxes. Furthermore, SZX has very few international flights (much like SHA); if it were possible to fly from SZX to LAX, LHR, SYD, JNB, etc, you'd see a lot less of the Shenzhen Shuffle.

Any way you slice it, more airports means more supply and more competition.

MORE competition in between the airports. MORE opportunity for the the airlines to profit off of convenience. Convenience is the biggest factor in getting a good price or not.

Taxes and fees flying from Shanghai to Shenzhen are 200rmb (more if over 800KM). Shanghai to Hong Kong are $355HKD.

Cheapest ticket to Shenzhen is ~400 rmb. Cheapest ticket to Hong Kong is around 700 rmb. Cheapest ticket to Shenzhen is plentiful. To Hong Kong is not so.

What are you talking about? Both Juneyao and Spring sell PVG-HKG for y100 (plus a boatload of taxes/fees) on a daily basis. Your HKG/SZX comparison is meaningless.

I'm talking about taxes and fees. My numbers are correct.

I excluded the LCC from the lowest as people are unlikely to use them to connect to another flight.

Point taken. But, I fail to see why this is an issue at all. Those HK people expect us to pay our share of the $28 billion they spent to build their airport.

I fail to see how this is relevant to the instant case.

Why would you exclude them? Let's say I want to fly from Shanghai to a secondary market in Australia. My choices are: 1) KA/CX on one ticket; 2) get myself to HK, and proceed onward from there.

In the case of #2, why would I exclude Spring/Juneyao from my list of PVG-HKG options?

Looks like CX/KA will keep old PEK https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-for-dominance？CX/KA needs to be able to chuck PEK-HKG passengers onto CA flights and vice versa.

And SkyTeam, anchored by MU/CZ will move to the new Beijing South.

What does this mean for oneworld airlines?

Certainly would think QF would want to follow MU., And likely AA similar with CZ

Your link 404s for me.

Let's try this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-for-dominance

No mention of what will happen to Hainan which has a pretty big operation at PEK

My guess is airlines will only move if they're forced to, and the only ones forced to initially will be Skyteam in order to make the new airport a hub

Longer term one of China Southern or China Eastern will move to Oneworld and at that point the rest of the alliance will also be forced to move