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While the critics were adamant that the Brisbane West Wellcamp Airport had as much chance of taking off as one of those figurative white elephants, Mr Wagner and his brothers put $200 million and the muscle of their international construction, building services and manufacturing group behind the project.
Two years on from the opening of the gleaming terminal building, the airport has a designation code of WTB and a future that hardly anyone envisaged.
Except the Wagners.
“The … local council didn’t have the money or the foresight or the vision, the state government doesn’t do airports and the federal government, you know, if they do anything at all they take years and years to get around to it,” said 56-year-old Mr Wagner, who drove the development. “So we decided to do it ourselves. It felt right. It has always felt right.”
Qantas was the first airline to sign up, then regional carriers Airnorth and Regional Express. The 74 scheduled passenger flights that buzz in and out of Wellcamp each week are due to increase to 130 in the new year, in addition to charters for fly-in, fly-out workers shuttling between the mines and new coal-seam gas fields in southern and central Queensland.
The first Hong Kong-bound air freighter with Cathay Pacific Airways touched down on Tuesday night in another milestone. “Everyone said to us, initially, that you will never get a freighter to run out of Toowoomba, it just won’t happen,” Mr Wagner said.
Set up for 1.2 million passengers a year, with the 2.87km runway capable of handling any aircraft up to the Boeing 747, Wellcamp was a casebook in blue-sky thinking.
It is the first big-league, general-purpose airport to be built from scratch in Australia since Tullamarine came on line in Melbourne, in July 1970.
The Wagners did it their way, on their land, with their own cash, crews and equipment, using cement mixed in a company plant and soil and rock fill hauled from on-site quarries.
From start to finish, the build took 19 months and 11 days, Mr Wagner said proudly. The airport turned a profit five months ago.
In the adjoining industrial park — yes, it’s owned by the family firm — they’re to construct a $35m plant for Au Lait Australia to make milk-based infant formula for the Chinese market. The work will start in January, with a $110m second stage planned for 2018 to process fresh milk, also earmarked for export to China by air.
By then, Mr Wagner hopes to have a daily international passenger service operating from Wellcamp, probably to regional China or Vietnam, and at least three weekly freight flights with Cathay Pacific and possibly other carriers. Two purpose-built tanker aircraft will fly a daily milk run to Shanghai under the plan.
Direct passenger services to Townsville start next week and additional domestic destinations were to be added in the coming months, he said. Currently, there were daily returns to Sydney and services to Melbourne and Cairns. Airlines pay landing fees comparable with those charged by Brisbane Airport, 130km to the east.
Wagners is developing a cargo wharf at Pinkenba near the mouth of Brisbane River and looking at a spur line to link Wellcamp to the proposed inland rail corridor. This would convey freight to and from Melbourne within 17 hours and put the airport astride an “intermodal transport hub”, boosting export access to Asia.
A new highway bypass over the Toowoomba range runs past Wellcamp, taking shape in a scar of earthworks at the base of the runway. When completed in 2018, it will cut driving time from the Brisbane CBD to 80 minutes. Mr Wagner said economic modelling produced for the company showed that every freight flight would support an additional 1052 jobs — “extra people working for producers, truckers, the shippers at the airport, freight forwarders”.
After dispatching prime beef cuts to Hong Kong in the inaugural freight run, supplier Oakey Holdings will double the production of a local abattoir. The consignment that landed in the Chinese territory on Wednesday included infant food formula and lightweight poly piping.
As Mr Wagner tells it, this is only the start: his five-year target is 4000 tonnes of cargo a week and 1.5 million passengers a year. “Those numbers are absolutely achievable,” he said.
Toowoomba Mayor Paul Antonio said the airport had already made an “amazing” difference to the range-top city of 160,000: “There is an air of optimism here.”
Full story source: The Australian - November 26 2016