Future
Linfox hoped Avalon would capture 10% of the Melbourne domestic passenger market by 2010, increasing to 20% by 2017 which it was claimed would eventually represent up to 3.4 million passengers each year. Further expansion plans involve international passenger and freight flights to the Asia-Pacific rim and Europe.
An upgrade to the current terminal was planned to handle AirAsia X and future international passenger airline flights. This new facility would have provided Avalon with customs, immigration, quarantine and retail facilities and would have been approximately 8,000 m2 (86,000 sq ft) in size.
Accompanying speculation about the opening of an international terminal at Avalon, India's Kingfisher Airlines expressed interest in flying from Avalon to Bangalore non-stop, utilising Airbus A330-200 or Airbus A340-500 aircraft. However severe financial difficulties have all but crippled Kingfisher's operations.
On 17 November 2010 as part of the 2010 Victorian state election campaign, Liberal National Coalition's leader Ted Baillieu committed to build a railway line to the airport if they formed the government. To be built as a branch from the Geelong line and with an estimated total cost of $250 million, his commitment was for $50 million to cover planning, land acquisition and preliminary works for the single track line. The additional $200 million will come from the state government and from the airport, with the Commonwealth government to be asked to contribute a third of the cost . The airport management welcomed the announcement, which will also include an aviation fuel pipeline to the airport from the Shell Geelong refinery.
Read more about this topic: Avalon Airport
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“I am succeeding quite well in my work and the future looks well. What special mission is God preparing me for? Cutting off all earthly ties and isolating me as it were.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The future is just as much a condition of the present as is the past. “What shall be and must be is the ground of that which is.””
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)