Before Canada's New Government does that they might want to make public the case for a Pickering airport. A comparison with Heathrow suggests YYZ isn't going to be stretched any time soon:
Land area (square kilometres):
YYZ 18.67
LHR 12.14
There is nothing to suggest that there is a link between land area and passenger capacity. Mirabel was the largest airport by land area at one time...
YYZ
never operates with any more that 3 runways (4 once 5R-23L is built) in service at on time. The two 15-33 runways are for situations where there are crosswinds. So you cannot say that YYZ should have nearly 3X the capacity of Pearson.
2012 passengers:
YYZ 34,912,456
LHR 70,037,417
As has been mentioned before YYZ takes approx 37 000 aircraft movements per year that are not headed to the terminal. These are private charters, GA traffic, Air show traffic on Labour day (minor traffic), etc. Pearson would like to off load these aircraft to another airport (Pickering) and add more commercial air traffic. Doing so could add nearly 4 000 000 additional passengers. Pickering could take these aircraft plus Buttonville's and be one of Canada's 10 busiest airports by aircraft movements without even having commercial scheduled airlines.
Also as RBT stated YYZ still has many small regional aircraft, 737's and 319's and 320's, that carry 180 or so passengers. YYZ would eventually move to try to have more larger aircraft in the future in order to increase the number of passengers per aircraft.
2012 aircraft movements:
YYZ 433,990
LHR 475,176
YYZ plans to have 600 000 aircraft movements per year once the new 5L-23R runway is built.
The GTA's population has been growing between 1% and 2% per year. At 1% it would take YYZ 70 years to reach LHR's passenger volume. At 2% it would take 35 years.
Aircraft movement is more problematic given that YYZ is around 91% of LHR in this category, but it's reasonable to assume that the number of destinations will grow at a slower rate than passenger traffic, suggesting that aircraft movements won't keep pace with passenger volume. In other words, bigger planes will become more economic on routes with high passenger growth. Aircraft movement would also appear to be mitigated by the fact that YYZ occupies approximately 50% more land area than LHR, and has three more runways, so its capacity to handle increased movement should be considerably greater than LHR's.
Whatever Flaherty's reason was for announcing Pickering, it didn't appear to have anything to do with data.
LHR has three other nearby airports to handle other traffic, allowing it to focus on large jets and long distance routes.
- LHR also suffers from significant constraints causing many airlines/aircraft to circle above the airport waiting for a landing slot/terminal gate. Like idling your car circling the airport for 20 minutes or more creates
more pollution.
- On the terminal side LHR does not have enough terminal gates and is charging airlines significant surcharges for staying too long at the gate be it arriving early or a departing late.
- On the airside LHR would LOVE to have at least a third runway. They have been trying to plan for one for at least two decades and have met local opposition at every turn
If we are going to look at LHR as a model may as well look at the whole thing.
