Increasing Wellington Airport's capacity for larger planes

Wellington Airport is planning ahead for a significant increase in aircraft movements over the next 30 years, by identifying potential high value extensions to its airfield infrastructure.

Wellington Airport is an international facility, serving over 6 million passengers per year who visit the world's southernmost capital city. It also hosts nine airlines and direct flights to 25 destinations throughout the region, including Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.

While Wellington Airport can comfortably handle the 85,000 annual aircraft movements (flights arriving and departing) it currently experiences, a large increase in traffic expected over the next 30 years is anticipated to test this capacity.

Given our strong reputation within New Zealand for delivering high quality airport projects - including Airside Design - Wellington Airport partnered with Beca to complete an airfield utilisation study with the aim of understanding any future issues and identifying high value future capacity improvements.

Our study began by looking at the current fleet using the airport, before applying event simulation software FlexSim to model over 40 different aircraft movement scenarios under different weather conditions, runway operational directions and airfield layouts.

As a result, we were able to determine a range of infrastructure investment options which combined, can meet the projected growth in the next 30 years and optimise airfield utilisation to achieve significant reduction in average departure holding times.