Ces trois cartes et ces trois schémas pour vous inciter à lire l'excellent "Rulers of the new silk road" publié cette semaine par le toujours aussi incontournable The Economist, sur la montée en puissance d'Emirates, de Qatar Airways et de Etihad Airways et de leur place aéroportuaire respective dans le trafic aérien mondial.
Extraits : "Across the way is Dubai Airport’s Terminal 3, which opened without a hitch six months after the botched start-up of Terminal 5 at Heathrow, London’s biggest airport. Both terminals can handle about the same number of passengers—a little under 30m a year—and both were designed and built for the exclusive use of their incumbent flag carriers. But there the similarities end.
Whereas T5 was shoehorned into a cramped site, T3 covers three times as much space. And whereas the Heathrow terminal will never get any bigger, T3 will soon be the largest building in the world by floor space, thanks to a new concourse dedicated to Emirates’ growing fleet of Airbus A380s. When that opens in 2012, the terminal will be able to accommodate 23 of the leviathan aircraft on stand at the same time and handle 43m passengers.
About 42m people a year pass through the airport’s three terminals now, according to Paul Griffiths, Dubai International’s chief executive. Earlier this year it became the world’s third-busiest international airport (see chart 1). With passenger growth running at an annual rate of nearly 20% and capacity planned to reach 90m in the next few years, it will not be long before Dubai overtakes Heathrow." (...)
(...) "The ambitions of two other Gulf emirates are equally extraordinary. In Qatar, Doha International airport, about 200 miles from Dubai, will open in 18 months’ time with a capacity of 24m passengers a year, rising to twice that in 2015 (see chart 2).
Abu Dhabi’s airport, about 45 minutes’ drive from Jebel Ali, aims to increase its capacity to 20m in 2012 and to 40m a few years later.
Thus within five or six years there will be more capacity at these three Gulf airports than there is now at Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt combined. Are these merely grandiose vanity projects, fuelled by more money than business sense ? Or do the new airports—and the linked ambitions of the three emirates’ airlines—reflect a fundamental shift in global aviation power ? "
Parmi les questions qui ne sont pas abordées dans l'article, mais que l'on peut légitimement se poser , voir là et là.