As New Zealand’s largest private development project, Auckland Airport’s transformation plays a key role in the nation’s wider infrastructure sector.
Susana Fueyo Suarez, Auckland Airport’s chief infrastructure officer, says the project has huge scale and the airport is in it for the long haul.
Because there are major projects now in progress or planning across transport, terminals and airfield with more to come, Auckland Airport can offer its infrastructure partners a steady state, predictable pipeline of work. This creates the right climate and conditions for further investment in skills and capacity. It also means security and continuity of employment.
“The beauty of infrastructure projects like this is that it has an impact right across the industry,” says Fueyo Suarez. “You need designers, architects, engineers, carpenters and riggers. It creates the employment and the vehicle needed to bring that capability to bear. So when new infrastructure projects come online elsewhere in Auckland, there is a ready-made workforce that has been well-versed in doing this kind of work.”
“We have a fantastic team and since the pandemic we have ramped up to 120 people. Yet New Zealand is a small country and we need to attract talent. We want to attract the skilled Kiwis who have been working internationally to come back home for this project.”
An engineer by training, Fueyo Suarez has been in the Auckland Airport role for six months. She moved here from Australia where she had led large-scale development projects in aviation, transport infrastructure and defence.
She says she was attracted to the job because of the significance of an expanded airport to the wider New Zealand economy: “A 20% increase in tourism translates to a $3.6 billion increase in GDP”.
Expanding a busy international airport without undue disruption is a complex, but necessary undertaking. The airport is operating at capacity. Its existing domestic and international terminals are close to 60 years old and were built to accommodate the needs of a different era.
She describes the task as a once-in-a-generation transformation. The challenge lies in staging the work programme in a way that means the airport can continue to operate safely and with an understanding of how the work might impact on passengers and the airport’s other stakeholders: “It is a balance. In an ideal world we like to close the airport down for two years and get on with it, but that is a luxury that we don’t have.”
The airport has a web of stakeholders, each with different needs, that can make even relatively simple tasks complex.
Take the business of closing a road to enable construction work.
Fueyo Suarez says: “Usually if you close a road, you have to deal with drivers, bus operators and emergency services. Here we have a complicated stakeholder environment.
“There are the joint border agencies. There is the Ministry for Primary Industries, aviation security, Customs, there are ground handlers, all the airlines and all the people who work here. All of these groups need to be consulted and involved.
“What would otherwise be a relatively straightforward road closing operation requires much more planning”.
She likens sequencing airport construction projects to playing a game of Tetris: “When the next block comes you have to rotate it three times, fit it in and create room for the next block.”
There is also the question of managing what Fueyo Suarez calls the social licence. “People expect us to do the work faster, but we can’t because that would mean closing the airport. So it is going to be a long process and we need to take everyone on the journey with us. We need them to understand how and why we work this way.”
At the time of writing, the airfield expansion project is at about the halfway point.
When that job finishes sometime next year, airport managers will be able to use the space to park aircraft overnight, which will free up room to start construction on the domestic jet terminal in the area currently used to park aircraft.
Next door to this, the airport is constructing what it calls the “stitch”. This is the building connecting the international terminal with what will become the domestic jet terminal.
The domestic jet terminal has been designed with flexibility in mind. At the moment there are no wide-body domestic aircraft operating here, but the terminal will be able to cater for both narrow-body and wide-body planes. That way, if there is increased demand for the larger aircraft for international flights, the airport will be able to cope.
Auckland Airport expansion work.
Combining the international and domestic terminals is the centrepiece of the airport expansion. It will bring two terminals together into a seamless whole, ending the need for transferring passengers to walk between terminals. The airport is also adding capacity to handle a further 12 aircraft - six of which can be wide-body aircraft like the Airbus 380 or the 787 Dreamliner. The design will be flexible, so the expansion can handle smaller aircraft as needed.
Fueyo Suarez says the expansion will, “allow us to have 44% increased capacity on how we manage people getting from the terminal into the planes. An increase of 44% in the processing capacity and a 26% increase on the number of seats”.
Underground work
Work is now under way on the area in front of the transport hub, which means closing the inner terminal road.
“Under the surface we are doing lots of work on something called the Common Service Trench,” says Fueyo Suarez. “This carries all the power, the stormwater, the telecommunications, more or less everything under the road. It will provide the power for the new infrastructure and divert the stormwater that usually comes from the north to the south before flowing into the bay. We are also diverting east to west to give us more resilience.
The inner terminal road will be upgraded as part of a wider programme to update the airport’s road and transit system. This includes changes to Laurence Stevens Drive which includes a T3 lane for the buses that links the airport’s park and ride facilities to the terminal as well as improve transport connections to South Auckland and Puhinui Station.
Says Fueyo Suarez: “When complete the road network will be a seamless one-way loop to move people to ‘pick up and drop off’ but will also smooth the way for public transport and rideshare. There is maintenance work at the existing domestic terminal fixing the toilets which were starting to look prehistoric and we are upgrading the WiFi connectivity.”
“We have already replaced all the gas boilers with more effective heat pumps as part of our work on sustainability and our future resilience. Now the ground transport hub is being finalised and we are preparing to open the next stage”.
While the work on these projects progresses, Fueyo Suarez and the airport’s infrastructure team are starting to plan for a new cargo precinct. An area of land has been set aside for an eventual new northern runway, but that is not currently scheduled into the work programme.
Meanwhile, the airport plans significant pavement renewals on the main runway at some time in 2029 or 2030. “Auckland is a single runway operation and we don’t have a curfew, so it is in use 24-7. That means we have to make sure what we currently use as a taxi-way can become a runway”.
Some of the concrete in the main runway was poured in 1964. Fueyo Suarez says the maintenance team continues to monitor the slabs and there is a regular programme of repair to keep it reliable and make sure operations are safe, but a replacement will soon be necessary.
● Auckland Airport is an advertising sponsor of the Herald’s Infrastructure report.
