Alan Joyce Wants Sydney Airport Terminals Merged

Alan Joyce, CEO of Qantas, has proposed connecting Sydney Airport’s two domestic and international terminals.

At an American Chamber of Commerce event on Monday, Joyce suggested that the two should be combined because the current separation between them is a “pain point” for travellers.

He explained that in order to build a new international terminal for Qantas and its partners, “they would have to extend where we are on the domestic side.” This area now serves as a domestic hub for the airline.

That’s the goal we’d want to see the airport progress towards.

This year, a group of pension funds and international investors paid $23.6 billion to buy the facility. Still, when the new Western Sydney Airport opens in 2026, it will have new competition.

This year, the old airport has been plagued by issues as it has failed to meet rising demand in the face of COVID isolation and a lack of available staff. However, results enhanced greatly as it and airlines immediately hired additional personnel.

Joyce also took the opportunity to address the supply chain concerns that had kept five Jetstar 787s grounded for weeks due to unusual circumstances, including “several” lightning and bird strikes.

“Windshields – we generally have two or three spare parts, but, right now, they are a limited commodity internationally,” he said. We could have sourced and installed a replacement in 12 hours, so we would only have been with your plane for a day.

His words came on the same day that it was disclosed that Jetstar had a cancellation rate in September that was about 10%, or nearly five times higher than the long-term industry average of around 2%.

The airline responded that September was a “tough month for operations” and that this was “well documented.”

We sincerely apologise to customers whose vacations were disrupted due to several unanticipated engineering issues that affected our fleet and caused significant disruptions across our network.

We’re happy to report that our operations have stabilised significantly in October and expect them to improve even further in November thanks to the hard work of our personnel in getting all the aircraft back in the air.