Sydney Airport slots co-ordination to be handed to UK firm over long-term Australian managers

An Australian company responsible for co-ordinating valuable access to Sydney airport will be replaced by a UK company owned by five British airlines.

The federal government will hand the contract for managing valuable access to Sydney airport to a UK company owned by five British airlines, after apparently telling the Australian slot co-ordinator it had “had it for long enough”.

The decision follows a review of slot management at the ­nation’s biggest gateway, which has been the responsibility of Airport Co-ordination Australia for 25 years.

A recent audit of slot use at Sydney airport found that airlines were working within the rules, and using their peak hour slots more than 85 per cent of the time.

London-based Airport Coordination Limited will take over responsibility for allocating slots or time windows to airlines to access Sydney for the next three years, to the dismay of ACA chief executive Petra Popovac and chair John Hart.

Ms Popovac said the government was “giving away Australian jobs” on the basis that ACA had held the contract for long enough.

“I find it unbelievable that the government would risk Australian jobs at Christmas while choosing a UK airline-owned company over an Australian company for this tender,” said Ms Popovac, who is also chair of the World Airport Slots board.

She said it seemed ironic that the Labor Party’s election slogan was “Building Australia’s Future”.

“It should probably be ‘selling Australia’s future’,” Ms Popovac said.

Mr Hart said there had been a lot of misinformation about the way slots were managed out of Sydney, which appeared to have cost ACA its contract. This included claims that the Rex and Bonza airlines had failed because of difficulty accessing slots at Sydney airport, when in truth Bonza had never applied for slots and Rex had more than it was able to use.

“There’s been a huge amount of misinformation that was teased out at the recent Senate inquiry into the Sydney airport demand management bill,” Mr Hart said.

“It was very clear from the questions asked that there was virtually no understanding of what the slot management role is, and the way in which ACA has undertaken that role and the level of satisfaction from all stakeholders as to how that’s ­occurred.”

Managing slots at Sydney airport has been hotly debated in recent years after Qantas and Virgin Australia were wrongly accused of slot hoarding. Picture: James Gourley

Another criticism was that Qantas and Virgin Australia were on the board of ACA, along with the Regional Aviation Association and Sydney Airport.

However, Ms Popovac said slots were allocated independently of the board.

“They’re there to ensure we’re a financially viable company, we are revenue-neutral,” she told The Australian in August.

“It’s up to the slot manager, which is me, to ensure the slots are allocated in a neutral, transparent and non-discriminatory manner, which they are.”

New slot co-ordinator ACL was owned by British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, easyJet, TUI Airways and Jet2.com, and managed slots at 75 airports worldwide including Heathrow, Dubai, Auckland and Abu Dhabi.

Following the audit of Sydney airport slots, Transport Minister Catherine King introduced legislation to parliament adding four new offences designed to stop airlines from “slot hoarding”. 

However, the audit undertaken by To70 Aviation found no evidence that Qantas and Virgin Australia were hanging onto more slots than they needed, or excessively cancelling flights.

Comment has been sought from Ms King about the decision to award the slot co-ordination contract for Sydney airport to ACL.

Ms Popovac said ACA would seek a review of the decision and “more information about how they came to the decision”.

“We’ve been doing an excellent job for the last 25 years, and there is an Australian term ‘if it’s not broken don’t fix it’, and there is nothing broken here,” she said.

“We do an excellent job and we provide a much-needed experienced service to the aviation community and the wider community through our work.”

Sydney Airport declined to comment.