Sunshine Coast Airport aims high with new runway

Sunshine Coast Airport has not seen a commercial flight in almost three months, but celebrates a new runway opening on Sunday.

Andrew Brodie on Sunshine Coast Airport’s new runway.

Sunshine Coast Airport north of Brisbane has not seen a commercial flight in almost three months, and there are none scheduled, but in an act of unbridled optimism a ribbon-cutting ceremony will be held there on Sunday to mark the opening of a long-awaited new runway.

“It’s a bit sad,” admitted chief executive Andrew Brodie.

“We have an Alliance [Airlines] Fokker coming in and we will be doing a very simplified ribbon cutting, so to speak. There’s obviously a lot of constraints with COVID-19 and we’re adhering to all of that.”

Despite the bittersweet nature of the runway opening at a time when airport revenue was down 96 per cent and 500 of the 700-strong workforce stood down, Mr Brodie was focused on the ­future.

At 2450m, the runway was almost 500m longer than the one it replaced, meaning the airport could at last handle full payload flights from Perth, Darwin and New Zealand.

“This will open the doors to ports like that and of course in the north and also to Southeast Asia,” Mr Brodie said.

“We haven’t had any commercial jets for the past three months but we are now looking forward to the borders reopening and once that happens, we’re very confident this destination will position itself very well on the ­national stage and, at the right time, the international stage.”

Mr Brodie also saw more opportunities for intrastate flying to and from the Sunshine Coast and to ports such as Cairns, Townsville and Rockhampton.

“This port has never had a service north, ever,” he said.

“One big piece of work we’re doing is making sure we’re on the kangaroo trail and getting high-value tourism into this region. For that reason ports like Cairns are very, very important for us.”

For now, neither Qantas nor Virgin Australia have the Sunshine Coast on their schedule for a planned increase in domestic flying in coming weeks.

Although local tourism operators are seeing more business from road trippers, Mr Brodie said it was doing nothing for them.

Bought from the Sunshine Coast Regional Council by Palisade Investment Partners in 2017, the airport had completed a master plan to diversify its revenue stream, but the pandemic struck “a couple of years too early”.

Far from watching the paint dry on the new runway, Mr Brodie said his team was getting on with the job.

“Sometimes out of adversity some good things do happen and it’s given us the time to restrategise and really get into our business from a microperspective,” Mr Brodie said.