After a long wait, passengers will be able to fly into and out of a new Sydney airport from 25th October 2026 with a Jetstar Airbus A320 gaining the honour of being the first to fly out at 11am to the Gold Coast. The new Western Sydney International Airport (WSI) has taken 15 years of planning, seven years of construction and another year of testing, but it won’t be an immediate ‘full steam ahead’ opening. Jetstar will lead the way, operating up to 14 flights a week between WSI and Melbourne, four weekly flights to the Gold Coast and three weekly flights to Brisbane. The runway will already be in use before this though, with freight operations due to begin on 26th July. Qantas Freight starts regular flights to and from WSI on 27th July.
The new Sydney airport will ease in
Domestic services will dominate the offerings for the first month before Singapore Airlines begins daily flights to Singapore Changi on 23rd November (SQ201,tickets now on sale) joining Air New Zealand which commences flights to Auckland on 26th October (NZ0165 on sale now). From 1st November, WSI is expected to take advantage of their position as a 24 hour airport, unlike the still in place 11pm–6am curfew that restricts operations at Sydney Airport in Sydney’s suburb of Mascot.
The domestic and international terminals of the new airport are located at Badgerys Creek, 44 kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD and are expected to serve up to 10 million passengers annually. This detail, combined with the delay (possibly to 2028) in completion of the new metro line servicing the new airport which was planned to open at the same time as the airport, could be a consideration for some of the more than 50 airlines currently flying in and out of Sydney Airport in Mascot, mainly overseas carriers. Currently, only four airlines have announced their plans to operate out of WSI, Jetstar, Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Air New Zealand. Qantas will initially operate domestic services out of WSI commencing on 28th March 2027, with four flights per week to Brisbane and Melbourne.
One upside is that there will be plenty of parking until full operations come on stream. Travellers to and from the airport should benefit from the recent opening of the M12 Motorway and significant road upgrades in the area. Residents in Western Sydney will be, for now, the main beneficiaries of the new airport. As Australia’s third-largest economy and home to half of the city’s population, they will appreciate the convenience, especially as considerable planning has gone into the design of flight paths to reduce noise levels.
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