It requires a determined embrace of stupidity in communications  for a major Australian airport, in this case Melbourne’s, to issue a very good draft development plan for public comment and hide critical text and graphics behind gigantic words DRAFT on its website.

Well, that has to be the best news for a new airport in the Sydney basin for years. Sydney Airport chairman, Max Moore Wilton, has given Fairfax Media the definitive commitment not to put SACL’s hand up to exercise its first right of refusal to build a second Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek

If Tony Abbott was delivering Anthony Albanese’s study into the suitability of Wilton as a site for a 2nd Sydney Airport which was released today he would have described it as ‘dead, buried and cremated.’

  Richard Branson’s appearance at the Virgin Australia Regional Airlines event in Perth yesterday saw the media all but totally ignore two very important messages from the only individual to have made somewhere north of $600 million from aviation in Australia. 

Some international arrivals at the expanded Darwin Airport terminals might wonder if they haven’t just had a boat bypass and gone straight to Nauru or Christmas Island.

Europe is not only full of superb old buildings but comical relics of aviation protectionism, as demonstrated by Austrian authorities declaring Vienna airport ist geschlossen to Emirates A380s and denying it an extra code share flight to reflect the new business partnership with Qantas.

  In their own right Avalon Airport, Melbourne’s ambitious second airport, and Cebu Pacific, the Philippines second largest long haul flag carrier see themselves joining together as a dream team that can transform aviation in their respective countries. Their aims, of taking on the air transport establishments of Australia and the Philippines, have come together [...]

Richmond keeps going ‘ping’ on the political radar screens as a limited use ‘relief’ airport for Sydney while the solution, a second full sized airport in the Sydney basin, awaits bipartisan political support.

  This may seem like a small step, make that steps, in the right direction, but the Qantaslink move from T2 to the main Qantas T3 domestic terminal at Sydney Airport is going to save around one million travellers a year the frustration of schlepping from one to the other

While Plane Talking has no plans to get between the Courier-Mail and Brisbane Airports while they are exchanging artillery fire, the $2.50 pax new runway levy reported by the former has been denied by the latter.

As the enormity of the Brisbane Airport crisis continues to flood the city that finds its growth ambitions hostage to demands for advance funding of a second long runway which will take eight years to complete anyhow, the Sunshine Coast is leveraging the situation for all this it is worth.