Artist’s rendering shows what the interior of YVR’s new Link building could look like in 2007. w double bridge allows unloading m front and rear of plane.

Just as Singapore acts as a gateway to Southeast Asia and Amsterdam to Europe, Larry Berg believes Vancouver International Airport can take on a similar role for the boom in Asian flights to North America.

“The last century was the Atlantic century, this one is the Pacific century,” said Berg, YVR’s president and chief executive officer. “Vancouver has the good fortune to be the shortest point between Asia and North America. That’s a tremendous advantage to us in developing this gateway, and playing a similar role to that of Singapore and Amsterdam in their regions.”

The Chinese tourism market alone is expected to grow 3.5 fold between now and 2014, from an $87-billion industry today to more than $300 billion, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council.

Due to its expanding role as a gateway to Asia, YVR expects to serve in excess of 16 million passengers in 2005 with growth taking it to 21 million passengers in 2010 and over 45 million in 2044.

Berg looks at international airport facilities in Singapore and Amsterdam as models for what YVR can become.

“They had the vision that as small countries, much smaller than Canada, that they could capture a disproportionate share of the travel and trade activity into southeast Asia on one hand and northern Europe on the other.

“They set out on a strategy relative to that and if you go to one of those two airports today you can see that. Singapore is one of the major airports in southeast Asia with a population of just three million and Amsterdam has more inbound traffic to Europe than [London‘s] Heathrow. They have captured a lot of the inbound traffic to Europe through a coordinated strategy that includes infrastructure, policies at the airport and a government policy that is very supportive of that strategy.

“Dubai is another example. Emirates Air has become one of the top two or three airlines in the world and Dubai has become one of the major transit points between Asia and Europe. They created that in just the last seven or eight years.”

Serving a projected 45 million passengers in a facility designed to handle fewer than half of that is the challenge that faces YVR. Work is underway on Phases II and III of the new international terminal, which will bring YVR’s total capacity to 22 million passengers a year.

YVR has embarked on a $1.4-billion capital program designed to ensure the facility can handle the expected growth in passengers as well as the newer, larger aircraft of the future. This includes the $420-million expansion to the international terminal, $352 million on information technology and sustaining capital and $300 million for the airport spur of the RAV line.

When these projects are completed — in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics — YVR will have added nine gates to its international terminal and a five-storey link building that will act as the connecting hub for RAV line passengers to the domestic and international terminals. At that point Berg and his team will have a strategic plan that will take them through the next 20 years and beyond, a plan that will likely include a new terminal building, an additional runway and a comprehensive ground transportation program.

Physical expansion is just the tip of the iceberg. Today’s modern airports require the cooperation of myriad agencies and government departments to work efficiently and effectively. This is a lesson most airports learn the hard way, and YVR is no exception.

“It’s not only about runways and terminals. All of the agencies that work here have to be upsized as well,” said Berg. “For example, if customs and immigration is too small, then people will miss their flights because people won’t be able to connect. If CATSA (Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) is inefficient, then you will have massive delays. If the baggage system is not scaled appropriately, you have the same thing.

“Everything has to run on a certain scale, it’s not as simple as just throwing up another terminal. All of your other systems have to be upscaled to handle the increased passenger and baggage volumes.”

Failure to anticipate and coordinate those needs will result in an airport that can’t compete on a global scale, and the loss of carriers to neighbouring markets that will meet their demands. Catering to the needs of the Asian market is key to sustaining YVR’s growth in the next 40 years and beyond.

“If you haven’t got the infrastructure for the carriers you aren’t going to attract the traffic,” said Berg. “One of the difficulties with the Asian traffic is that it is very peaky. Everyone wants to be here between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m,. so you end up building infrastructure to accommodate that peak.

“If you don’t have that capacity, they are going to go where they get that capacity — San Francisco, Seattle or L.A. Or they are going to fly over you with longer -range aircraft, so we need to have the capacity to maintain our competitiveness as a gateway.”

The alternative is pretty straightforward; in this business it is essentially a matter of compete or be put in mothballs. Berg and his team know that the decisions they make in putting together a strategic plan to carry them through the next 40 years will determine whether they follow the examples of Singapore and Amsterdam or that of Montreal‘s Mirabel airport.

Mirabel opened for business 30 years ago at a cost of $1 billion but is now closed to passenger traffic after a series of ruinous decisions by Quebec and federal lawmakers. Mirabel was probably doomed right from the start given its distance to downtown Montreal (55 kilometres) but a failure to properly predict trends in the aviation industry drove a stake through its heart.

“At the time, the new planes that were being built were [supersonic] Concordes, which required long runways and were noisy and not very environmentally friendly,” Jacques Roy, a transportation expert at the University of Montreal’s business school, told the Toronto Star last year. “So, the idea was to build an airport far away from the city.”

It turned out that technology let manufacturers develop highly efficient, environmentally friendly aircraft that were not nearly as loud or intrusive as their predecessors.

Poor planning cost Mirabel an opportunity to become the gateway to Europe for eastern Canada and the Maritimes, a mistake that Berg and his team are unwilling to repeat at YVR.

“As a result of that Montreal, which is a bigger city than Vancouver, only has 10 million passengers [a year],” Berg said.

“They failed to develop the international air traffic that a city like Montreal would warrant. Carriers wanted to go there but they weren’t going to go to Mirabel. It didn’t work for the carriers, it didn’t work for the passengers and it didn’t work for the province.

“Now they are playing the catch-up game at Dorval, but for a city like Montreal to have two-thirds of Vancouver‘s traffic despite having the greater population shows that there has definitely been a failure in policy.”

All of which is why Berg is putting so much emphasis on getting it right as YVR goes through its strategic planning process. The next generation of aircraft — Boeing’s medium-capacity, long-range 787 and the gargantuan Airbus A380 — will drastically alter the landscape and YVR wants to be able to capitalize on those changes.

To do so, YVR must figure out how to make the airport experience — for inbound and outbound passengers — as painless as possible. That means reducing, or eliminating, lineups for security, customs, immigration and baggage retrieval.

A Herculean task, but one that Berg’s team feels can be accomplished through the effective use of new and future technology, plus a little common sense.

YVR is considering a variety of baggage-handling options as part of its expansion to the international terminal, recognizing that more passengers means more luggage that must be processed effectively and efficiently.

The solution is not as straightforward as simply adding more carousels, said Bob Cowan, YVR’s senior vice-president of engineering,

“The A380 aircraft will have about 1,000 bags on it. That’s a lot of bags, so we have to get some bigger carousels to handle those bigger aircraft,” Cowan said.

“We also need to work with the Canadian Border Services Agency, the old Customs and Immigration, to allow them to streamline their process so that they can get people through the primary line quicker. If they can do that, it will mean that the passenger will be at the carousel when their bag arrives instead of the bag being there way ahead of the passenger, which is a real problem.”

Cowan has studied airports around the world to try to find workable solutions. He recently returned from Hong Kong and Seoul, South Korea, where he found two airports that are on the right track.

“Both of them have the customs issue solved. First of all, they have enough carousels. But probably more importantly, they have very efficient immigration processes. You get through their lines very, very quickly.

“In Hong Kong, more than 92 per cent of the passengers get through the primary line within 10 minutes. That’s impressive,” Cowan said.

“Practically everyone is at the carousel before their bags arrive. That’s not something you can say very often about Vancouver. What that means is that as quickly as the bags arrive there are people there to take them off [the carousel], they don’t stack up on top of each other.

“What we are learning now, and Seoul is similar with a very efficient immigration and enough carousels, is that it is a combination of having enough carousels and creating a very efficient primary [immigration] line.”

Kevin Molloy’s job, as YVR’s vice-president of simplified passenger travel, is to monitor the latest developments in the airline industry — from the use of biometrics for passenger identification to the expansion of government programs such as Nexus and Canpass that allow for advanced screening of passengers, to the development of a robotic arm to sort luggage — and make the correct recommendation on its use at Vancouver International.

In many cases, YVR is at the forefront of technological growth, acting as a test site for a variety of innovations including the popular kiosk check-in systems and a ground-breaking radio frequency identification system to track baggage.

The self-service kiosk check-in systems — now used by more than 75 per cent of YVR’s domestic passengers and soon to be available on all of the international carriers as well — are a perfect example of how life can be made simpler for travelers through technology.

Air Canada was the first to employ the systems at YVR but others, including WestJet, have been quick to see the benefits.

“The domestic self-service has given us about a 250- to 300-per-cent capacity improvement,” Molloy said. “Two years ago at 7 a.m., which is our domestic peak, lineups were everywhere and there was complete congestion. In the two years since, Air Canada has increased their passengers by about 25 per cent and through their restructuring have significantly downsized their workforce.”

The efficiency of the system will be enhanced even further with the completion of the RAV line in 2009. All of its stations, as well as a number of downtown sites such as the convention centre, will be outfitted with the self-service check-in kiosks.

But these types of innovations require more than just the will of YVR to be successful.

“We don’t move our industry forward by us simply wanting to,” said Molloy. “We need airlines to come along with us, we need government agencies to come along with us, so we are very much in a kind of advocacy position of promoting some of these products to government and to airlines.”

It all comes down to doing it right, but doing it at the right time.

“Timing is a huge issue for us. We are in facilities expansion mode,” said Molloy. “We may be pushing the envelope in exploring some of these very new leading-edge options, but that is because we don’t want to open a new facility in two years only to have these things become de facto standards the following year and then have to retrofit the facility.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2005