Letters | Why Hong Kong’s third runway is a mistake: look at Shenzhen airspace push

The third runway at the Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport will enable it to handle the throughput of 80 million passengers a year forecast for 2030. But it is likely to be completed long before Hong Kong is ready with its third runway, which is forecast (optimistically) to be completed in 2024. It took the Shenzhen airport just over two years to be completed, in 1991.

If it is used for take-off to the south, it is very likely to compete for airspace against Hong Kong's third, east-west runway, which already needs some of the mainland airspace to be annexed into Hong Kong’s airspace to accommodate its approach-to-land flight path. If the allocation of airspace is on a first-come-first-served basis, we might not as a result get enough of mainland airspace annexed to us.

So, it is somewhat of an understatement by Chinese aviation flight data service VariFlight that this Shenzhen expansion “would pose greater challenges of flight congestion and air traffic control”. In my view, it was sheer folly to build Hong Kong’s third runway as an adjunct to the existing Chek Lap Kok international airport when there was clearly no hope of adding a fourth runway there.