Ghost airport

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Ciudad Real airport before closure

Ghost airport is a name for an airport that is structurally largely operational, but has never been put into operation due to a lack of user interest or only handles commercial flights to a very limited extent.

In contrast to other small and rarely used airports, ghost airports were built for a far larger volume of passengers and air traffic than could actually be reached, so that they - like ghost towns - appear empty and deserted. Because of the lack of traffic, the high costs of building the airport often cannot be justified in purely economic terms.

At least some of these are investment ruins .

For other meanings of the term, see the relevant section below.

causes

Empty terminals: Albacete Airport

Ghostly airports are usually the result of bad planning based on unrealized economic forecasts or a lack of tourist flows that were estimated too optimistically. In Spain in particular, the economic crisis is often cited as the cause, because of which less has been invested in tourism projects that should have formed the basis of new tourist flows. Some of the projects are said to have been commissioned as a result of corruption . A study showed that between 2007 and 2013 the European Union supported many airport projects that were oversized or not needed at all. Many of these airports are too close to existing airports to be operated profitably, and there is often a lack of supra-regional or national coordination.

Other airports such as Kukës Airport in Albania, which was donated by an Arab sheikh, cannot offer scheduled services for legal reasons. The fate of a ghost airport could also happen to Spaceport America .

Examples

Airport city country End of construction Service life of scheduled services Investment amount Passengers
Albacete Airport Albacete SpainSpain Spain 2003 2003-2014 ? 1211
(2013)
Ashgabat Airport Ashgabat TurkmenistanTurkmenistan Turkmenistan 2016 since 1994 € 1,830 million -
Beja Airport Be yes PortugalPortugal Portugal 2011 - € 33 million 5044
(until April 2013)
Burgos Airport Burgos SpainSpain Spain 2008 since 2008 € 45 million 18,905
(2013)
Castellón Airport Castellón de la Plana SpainSpain Spain 2011 - € 150 million 0
Ciudad Real Airport Ciudad Real SpainSpain Spain 2008 2008–2012 € 1,100 million 35,000
(2010)
Cordoba airport Cordoba SpainSpain Spain 2008 2008 € 85 million 6956
(2013)
Huesca-Pirineos Airport Huesca SpainSpain Spain 2007 2007-2011 € 40 million 273
(2013)
Kassel-Calden Airport kassel GermanyGermany Germany 2013 since 2013 € 270 million 69,810
(2017)
Kukes Airport Kukës AlbaniaAlbania Albania 2007 - € 30 million 0
Lleida-Alguaire Airport Lleida SpainSpain Spain 2010 since 2010 € 95 million 33,041
(2012)
Łódź Wladyslaw Reymont Airport Łódź PolandPoland Poland 2012 since 1997 € 46.6 million 237,591
(2014)
Lublin-Świdnik Airport Lublin PolandPoland Poland 2012 since 2012 € 97.5 million 187,595
(2014)
Mattala Rajapaksa Airport Mattala, Hambantota District Sri LankaSri Lanka Sri Lanka 2013 since 2013 US $ 210 million 20,474
(2014)
Montreal Mirabel Airport Montreal CanadaCanada Canada 1975 1975-2004 CAN $ 500 million 0
(since 2005)
Region de Murcia International Airport Murcia SpainSpain Spain 2012 - € 250 million 0
San Bernardino Airport San Bernardino United StatesUnited States United States 2011 - US $ 220 million 201
(2013)
Sheffield City Airport Sheffield United KingdomUnited Kingdom United Kingdom 1997 1997-2002 £ 12.5m 33,000
(2000)
Tartu airport Tartu EstoniaEstonia Estonia 2013 since 2009 € 7.7 million 13,717
(2013)
Yangyang Airport Gangneung Korea SouthSouth Korea South Korea 2002 2002-2008; Resumption in 2010 US $ 400 million 5748
(2011)
Hengchun Airport Hengchun , Pingtung County TaiwanRepublic of China (Taiwan) Taiwan 2004 2004-2014 € 15.2 million 0
(2016)

Ghost terminals

Elsewhere, entire airports are not shut down, but parts of terminals have been closed. At Fuerteventura Airport , for example, a quarter of the gates have been shut down because the last extension of 14 gates, supported by the EU with € 21 million, was far larger than necessary.

Other meanings

Occasionally, there is also talk of ghost airports when they are airports with a very long delay in the construction phase. In addition to the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, which is still under construction , the Hamad International Airport in Qatar , for example, was only put into operation five years later.

Athens-Ellinikon Airport in 2014, more than 13 years after its closure

In the USA, ghost airports are mostly used to refer to disused airfields. There are airports around the world that have not (yet) been dismantled or cannot be used for any other purpose, but the standstill is not due to bad planning. The causes can be varied, for example when airports are being replaced by new ones and future use is still unclear, as is the case with Athens-Ellinikon Airport or Durban International Airport . Other airports are unused due to conflict, such as Nicosia Airport , which can no longer be operated due to the Cyprus conflict , and Gaza Airport , which was destroyed by the Israeli military during the Second Intifada in 2001 after only a little more than two years of operation. Some airfields are deliberately not being dismantled any further and are still recognizable, such as Galeville Military Airport in Ulster County , New York, which was closed in 1994 and declared a Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge a few years later . The Johnston Atoll and its airport, cleared by the American military in 2003 , have also been converted into a nature reserve.

Airports that are about to be closed can also develop into ghost airports because many airlines no longer use them. Most airlines said goodbye to Greater Southwest International Airport near Fort Worth earlier than planned after planning for Dallas / Forth Worth Airport had begun.

literature

  • European Court of Auditors (Ed.): EU-funded airport infrastructures: poor value for money . Special report. No. 21 . Luxembourg 2014 ( full report (PDF) [accessed January 6, 2015]).
  • Xavier Fageda, Augusto Voltes-Dorta: Efficiency and Profitability of Spanish Airports: A Composite Non-standard Profit Function Approach . Working paper. University of Barcelona, ​​2012 ( Complete thesis (PDF) [accessed January 6, 2015]).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Raphael Minder: In Spain, a Symbol of Ruin at an Airport to Nowhere. In: New York Times. July 18, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  2. ↑ a b European Court of Auditors (Ed.): EU-funded airport infrastructures: poor value for money . Special report. No. 21 . Luxembourg 2014 ( full report (PDF) [accessed 7 January 2015]).
  3. ↑ Introduction. In: Albacete Airport. Retrieved January 6, 2015 .
  4. ↑ Seraina Capatt: Turkmenistan's Pristine Airport. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. October 3, 2016, accessed October 5, 2016 .
  5. ↑ EU wastes taxpayers money for ghost airport in Portugal. In: German economic news . October 12, 2013, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  6. ↑ Only five thousand passengers used Beja Airport in two years. In: The Portugal News Online. April 18, 2013, accessed January 20, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Introduction. In: Burgos Airport. Retrieved January 6, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Castellón inaugura su aeropuerto con 150 millones de inversión pero sin vuelos. In: El Mundo. March 25, 2011, Retrieved January 5, 2015 (Spanish).
  9. ↑ a b Ute Müller: Spain is opening a ghost airport again. In: The world. November 30, 2014, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  10. ^ Stefan Eiselin: Spain's ghost airports. In: Aero Telegraph. June 15, 2011, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Ignacio Fariza: Córdoba Airport is an example of Spain's wasteful spending, says EU. In: El País. December 18, 2014, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Introduction. In: Córdoba Airport. Retrieved January 6, 2015 .
  13. ↑ AFP: Anybody out there? Ghost airport desperately seeks passengers. In: Traveler. November 14, 2011, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Introduction. In: Huesca-Pirineos Airport. Retrieved January 5, 2015 .
  15. ^ Philipp Alvares de Souza Soares: Crisis Airport Kassel-Calden: The ready-to-fly port. In: Spiegel Online. December 11, 2013, accessed June 23, 2015 .
  16. ↑ Kassel Airport | Numbers, dates and facts. (No longer available online.) January 4, 2018, archived from the original on January 31, 2018 ; accessed on January 4, 2018 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.kassel-airport.aero
  17. ↑ Jean-Arnault Dérens, Laurent Geslin: The highway of national corruption. In: Le Monde diplomatique . May 26, 2009, accessed January 5, 2015 .
  18. ^ Airports that never took off. In: CAPA Center for Aviation. August 12, 2011, accessed January 9, 2015 .
  19. ↑ El aeropuerto de Lleida-Alguaire transporta a 115,000 pasajeros en sus tres primeros años de vida. In: La Vanguardia. January 17, 2013, accessed January 9, 2015 (Spanish).
  20. ^ New tower and terminal at Lodz airport. In: PMR Publications. January 5, 2012, accessed January 8, 2015 .
  21. ↑ Statistics. In: Lodz Airport. Retrieved January 8, 2015 .
  22. ^ Lublin-Świdnik airport open to passengers. In: premier.gov.pl. December 17, 2012, accessed January 8, 2015 .
  23. ↑ Figures and Statistics. In: Lublin Airport. Retrieved January 8, 2015 .
  24. ↑ Max Bearak: Sri Lankan ex-president's vanity airport project grounded by cash crunch. In: Aljazeera. March 31, 2015, accessed May 6, 2017 .
  25. ↑ Annual Report 2014. (PDF) Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka, February 28, 2015, p. 13 , accessed on May 6, 2017 (English).
  26. ↑ Josh Eliott: Montreal's abandoned Mirabel Airport too costly to repurpose. In: ctv news. August 20, 2014, accessed February 27, 2015 .
  27. ^ A b Richard K. De Atle: San Bernardino: Acting executive director for airport. In: The Press Enterprise. October 15, 2014, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  28. ^ End of the line for Sheffield airport. In: The Star. April 22, 2008, accessed on January 9, 2015 (English): "The 12.5 million facility, built on a former opencast coal mine, ..."
  29. ↑ a b AS Tallinna Lennujaam: Annual Report 2013. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 14, 2015 ; accessed on January 7, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tallinn-airport.ee
  30. ↑ James Teideman: 14 of the world's most amazing abandoned airports. In: Skyscanner. March 7, 2014, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  31. ^ Terry Maxon: D / FW International Airport forced rivals to become fellow travelers. (No longer available online.) In: The Dallas Morning News. August 19, 2010, archived from the original on February 27, 2015 ; accessed on January 19, 2015 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dallasnews.com
  32. ^ Richard Bach: Dallas, Fort Worth and the Regional Airport . In: Flying Magazine . Volume 73, No. 2 , August 1963, p. 58 ( article on Google Books ).