Bucharest Millennium Airport: Greenfield airport opportunity

The challenge

A major Romanian retail group is acquiring land near Bucharest to build a greenfield alternative airport for the capital. They engaged our aviation team to provide key support from the earliest stages of development, including:

• a traffic forecast for the wider Bucharest catchment area
• an assessment of optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for airline and demand transfer.

Our approach

Our team focused on three areas. We interviewed likely key airline tenants to ensure the forecast was not an academic output. We developed a traffic forecast to serve multiple requirements, including the estimated passenger volumes that will form the basis of the airport financial model. And we ensured a deep and substantiated understanding of the relationship between passenger volumes and movements in relation to:

• overall capacity for peak day/hour operations
• stands for Code C and Code E aircraft
• the likely balance between LCC model and traditional carrier boarding requirement
• other potential bottlenecks, including security, immigration, baggage handling etc. 

The entire process is now being developed in stages to ensure the infrastructure is built to accommodate high demand whilst avoiding excess capital spend before it’s needed.

The results

Once the forecast is complete, our aviation team will engage directly with the construction developer partner on behalf of the client to ensure the forecast and planning results are reflected in the build plan.

More case stories