The usual airport chaos is even worse this Christmas. As the Government ponders a new terminal, Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, looks at options for Dublin's gateway
Aer Rianta has rolled out its customary Christmas cheer at Dublin Airport to welcome home thousands of Irish people returning for the festive season - as if decking the halls with proverbial boughs of holly will paper over the cracks or conceal the chaos at Ireland's premier gateway. The airports authority is under pressure, in every sense. Not only does it have to cope with the day-to-day task of managing an airport that is bursting at the seams, it now faces the prospect of losing control over Cork and Shannon airports - at a time when its political capital has been depleted by the squalid saga involving free cognac and cigars.
On top of all that, the Department of Transport is examining 13 "expressions of interest" in building a second air terminal, which will be independent of Aer Rianta, at Dublin Airport. The Department of Transport will decide whether the expressions of interest warrant a full tender process by January 17th.
Ryanair is among those bidding to build a second terminal, but the problem is that its proposed location - north of the original terminal building - clashes directly with Aer Rianta's latest proposal for a "low-cost" pier.
Last month, Ryanair appealed to An Bord Pleanála against Fingal County Council's decision to approve revised plans for Pier D, which was designed to cater for low-cost carriers, notably Ryanair. Its shoot-from-the-hip chief executive, Michael O'Leary, who has been an outspoken critic of Aer Rianta for many years, described the €70 million plan as "crazy".
Pier D is also being opposed by UPROAR (United Portmarnock Residents Opposing Airport Runway), whose primary objective is to defeat the plans for a second main runway at the airport. The group is led by Brian Byrne, who was - ironically - general manager of the airport until 1999; now he wants some peace and quiet at home in Portmarnock.
Although passenger jets are considerably less noisy nowadays, the staggering increase in air traffic means planes fly overhead every two minutes on average from early morning until late at night. Annual passenger numbers at Dublin Airport more than doubled over the past decade - from 5.2 million in 1991 to 14.3 million in 2001 - and the figure is expected to reach 15 million by the end of this year.
What lies behind Ryanair's appeal against Pier D is a titanic struggle with Aer Rianta over competing visions of the future of Dublin Airport. This is because where the airports authority wants to locate it would pre-empt Ryanair's site for a second terminal - conceived as a long linear plane park, with an arrivals-and-departures building as its centrepiece.
A second terminal is certainly needed in the medium- to long-term. As things stand, Aer Rianta is running to catch up with the growth of Dublin Airport, which it says is the fastest growing in Europe. Despite a €130 million extension to the main terminal building, officially opened last June, incipient or actual chaos still characterises the whole airport.
Architect and frequent flyer John Meagher, who is acting for Ryanair, is scathing about the layout, circulation pattern and facilities of the main terminal, which dates from 1972. "People are nearly hysterical by the time they get out. Pedro Almodóvar should make a movie about it, something like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." Leaving Dublin, as he says, it's not so bad. The new shopping mall in departures is better than most, there's a bit of light and air and at least you're going somewhere. But visitors coming into Dublin Airport for the first time, especially through Pier B, "must wonder what kind of country they've landed in and ask themselves 'is it all like this?' ".
The only way to get to or from the airport is by road, usually via the M1, which is now like a building site for the Dublin Port Tunnel. No wonder the airport looks like a vast car park, with corrals of long-term parking located further and further away from the main terminal building.
Incredibly, there are 18,000 public parking spaces in and around the airport, plus an additional 5,000 for employees, of which Aer Rianta accounts for 10 per cent.
Unlike many European airports, Dublin's has no rail link to the city-centre - or anywhere else. Plans to provide one are tied up in knots. Will the airport be served by a metro line from Shanganagh, running underground through the city centre, as envisaged just two years ago, or by a rail spur off the Sligo line, as Iarnród Éireann has proposed?.
The Minister for Transport, Seamus Brennan, recently cleared of any involvement in the cognac-and-cigars saga, is studying the options, having promised - perhaps somewhat optimistically - that an airport-rail link of some sort would be in place by 2007. If that really is his timetable, it's likely to involve a cheaper option than the metro.
One of the key issues is whether a rail spur to the airport will serve areas along the way or run through open countryside north of Finglas, thereby doing nothing for transport in the city. An alternative plan, put forward by former taoiseach Garret FitzGerald and James Nix, a transport researcher in Dublin Institute of Technology, would overcome this problem by routing it north, via Glasnevin.
Another intriguing possibility would involve re-routing the Dublin-Belfast mainline train track through the airport, branching it off north of Malahide. This would not only turn the airport into a major land transportation hub, but would also avoid the need to squeeze a third track into the existing line to eliminate conflicts with DART and suburban services. The putative airport rail or metro station would be located east of the existing main terminal in the draft master plan for Dublin Airport now being finalised by a team of consultants headed by international architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), along with Project Management Ireland (on infrastructure) and TPS Consult (on airport planning).
Appointed by Aer Rianta a year ago, the team was asked to prepare a 20-year plan based on a projected doubling of passenger numbers to 30 million. Notoriously, no such plan had ever been done before, which is why the airport - as Adrian Buckley (of architects deBlacam and Meagher, which is responsible for Ryanair's proposal) puts it - "has evolved up to now as a series of 'add-ons', like a tinker's yard".
According to Mark Foley, Aer Rianta's director of capital programmes, the master planners were given "a clean sheet with no predetermined constraints" - apart from the proposed second main runway. This is intended to replace a shorter runway, known as 11-29; it would be built 1.6 kilometres north of the existing main runway and parallel to it.
"One of the biggest challenges is the quantum leap in scale, so we wanted them to provide an integrated architectural context for the airport's future development", Foley says. And for Derek Moore, SOM's senior airport planner, this involves reconciling terminal facilities with the "overwhelmingly strong" geometry of two parallel runways.
Dozens of different options were whittled down to three:
1. Concentrate all the facilities on the east side of the airport where they are at present
2. Extend the existing terminal and provide a new "satellite" terminal to the west, linked underground
3. Develop a "greenfield" terminal to the west with its own landside access.
The third option is seen as the most problematic because it would mean doubling road and public transport access, like Terminal 4 at London Heathrow. What is likely to emerge from the master-planning exercise is a combination of the first and second options.
Yes, there would be provision for a second terminal to the west, independent of Aer Rianta, but it would function as a satellite. However, the primary focus of the plan will be to consolidate the main terminal and extend it southwards, to the rear of Pier C. Thiscould involve demolishing Corballis House, that incongruous remnant of the 18th century now swamped by the airport, as well as "relocating" the late Andrew Devane's church to make way for a new and larger multi-storey carpark, linked to a metro/rail station and bus station east of the main terminal. The existing short-term carpark would also go.
Pier A, now straining under the burden of handling 50 per cent of the airport's passengers, would be replaced with a larger and more modern facility, as (eventually) would Pier B, which handles a more modest 32 per cent. Both piers would be rebuilt parallel to the main runways and to Pier D.
SOM's current plan for Pier D bears no relation to the grimly utilitarian in-house scheme conceived in 1997. The latest design would provide 12 new stands for "quick turn-around" aircraft. Known as "contact stands", they do not require passengers to use buses or airbridges, though the latter may be added later. It would be linked to the main terminal by a semicircular elevated walkway wrapping around the forecourt of the airport's original (1944) terminal. This glazed walkway, suspended from stainless steel pylons, would contain segregated corridors for arriving and departing passengers. The two-storey pier would also be segregated to meet immigration requirements, with departures on the upper level and arrivals located below. The cost is put at €50 million, plus €20 million for the walkway.
Ryanair maintains that Pier D would not be cost-effective because it would only provide a net increase of eight additional stands for aircraft. "The average cost is €7.8 million per stand. It is therefore a 'high-cost' facility, contrary to the Government directive and does not enjoy the support of either of the two largest operators at Dublin Airport," according to Ryanair's submission to An Bord Pleanála.
Plugging Pier D into the centralised "processing box" of the main terminal has other downsides for passengers. Even the closest gate would be at least 600 metres from the check-in area, while the furthest would be more than one kilometre away - a long walk by any yardstick. And because of its curvature, the elevated walkway would not have a travelator.
By contrast, the second terminal designed by deBlacam and Meagher for Ryanair, would have its own centrally-positioned "processing box", placing the nearest gate only 63 metres from the check-in area. Distances would obviously be longer to the more remote gates but the linear form of the proposed terminal facilitates the use of travelators.
Ryanair's proposed terminal, extending as far east as the FLS hangar, would be fronted by a full-height glazed canopy with four sets of escalators serving arrivals and departures at first-floor level. Check-in islands would be widely spread to make more room for queues in an airy Stansted-like environment, with all services located at ground level.
It would make use of the boomerang-shaped road pattern at the airport, filling in its north side. It is also compatible with the location of the second runway, which Ryanair thinks is unnecessary. Instead of spending €100 million-plus on it, the airline argues that the existing 11-29 short runway should be extended at either end and the money saved - some €70 million - should be invested in an airport rail link.
As in Aer Rianta's draft master plan, Ryanir's plan makes provision for a metro station and a pair of huge multi-storey carparks to replace the existing facilities. Both sides agree that the current carpark structure has to go because it intrudes on views of the original terminal building, a design style that dates from the romantic era of air travel.
Half of the Ryanair terminal, including a pier stretching out to the west, is conceived as the first phase, at an estimated cost of €114 million. It would provide 24 "contact stands" for aircraft, representing an 80 per cent increase on the current capacity, and 12 more would be provided in the second phase.
The terminal would require the demolition of the old North Terminal, the more recent VIP suite, an aircraft hangar and the Aer Lingus technical services building, but the airline says all these facilities would be replaced.
"From everybody's point of view, and leaving the politics aside, what's needed operationally at the airport is more contact stands for quick turn-arounds," says Charlie Clifton, Ryanair's director of ground operations. "Aer Lingus support this because they're coming down to the market we're operating in. They're pretty pragmatic about it."
He is contemptuous of Aer Rianta's Pier D plan scheduled for phase one, saying a net eight new stands "isn't going to fix anything" at the airport. Ryanair's terminal would deliver more stands "at no cost to the taxpayer", but it can't be built unless Pier D is scrapped because its first phase stands on the same site. "You can't have the two of them, that's for sure." Clifton points out that the site, known as the north apron, was identified for its development potential by airport planners Scott Wilson in a 1998 land-use study of Dublin Airport commissioned by Aer Rianta.
"Why would they do something in the short-term that would kill this off?" Clifton asks. "Unless they're proceeding with their eyes closed." Aer Rianta has been accused of thwarting plans by landowners in the "red (safety) zones" around the airport to develop their lands for warehousing and suchlike - and then doing the same thing on its own account. It has also been treated with extraordinary indulgence by the planning authorities, on the basis that it must know the airport's needs.
By concentrating terminal facilities where they are at present with what Adrian Buckley of deBlacam and Meagher describes as an "umbilical cord" linking them to Pier D, Aer Rianta leaves itself open to the charge that it is seeking to justify the history of what it has done at the airport - as reflected by "all the turning and twisting they're doing to get the diagram to read right".
No busy airport will ever be quite finished, of course. But it is clear that Dublin Airport stands at a crossroads, with no sign of a consensus on how to proceed.
It will be up to Seamus Brennan and the Government to decide within months between the radically different visions of where it should go.