The Irish Air Line Pilots Association (Ialpa) says existing Customs and Border Protection facilities at Dublin Airport which pre-clear passengers travelling to the United States are “more than sufficient” for the airport’s 32 million passenger-per-year cap.
Dublin Airport operator DAA lodged plans in May for an expanded facility, claiming that US bound passengers “currently experience chronic congestion and [it] requires immediate expansion”.
Questioning the need for an expanded facility in a submission to Fingal County Council, Ialpa director of safety and technical, David Morrissey, says his group has demonstrated that the current US pre-clearance facility “no longer suffers from congestion issues”.
New procedures introduced for managing the queues in April of this year have “resulted in no overflow queuing within Pier 4″ and “the historical queues and congestion have been eliminated”, he says.
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However, planning consultants for DAA, Coakley O’Neill, have told the local authority that the overflow queuing system at the pre-clearance facility was required five out of every seven days last summer and is projected to be needed even more this summer.
They said 1.7 million passengers are projected to use the facility in 2023, up 13 per cent on last year.
It “is therefore the case that the current customs and border protection facility does not have the capacity to cater for the existing passengers,” Coakley O’Neill said.
Ialpa’s Mr Morrissey says a radical change to security screening policy combined with controlled passenger flows via improved terminal flight information service “is proving transformative”.
Mr Morrissey says the DAA’s “watershed” planning application “absorbs current contact stand space, duplicates main terminal facilities and adds further compaction of the south apron”.
“In order to protect future development [at the airport], DAA, charged with protecting the national gateway, has a stark choice – either allow a private airline consortium to thwart [Terminal 2′s] phase-two expansion or resign itself to the fact that base airline requirements effectively control airport development”.
The pilot’s union wants Fingal County Council to protect and preserve T2′s phase-two footprint for terminal expansion in the interests of proper planning and development of the area.
“Otherwise, notions of increasing the airport terminal capacity cap from 32 million passengers per annum to 40 million may prove elusive when justifying the same to An Bord Pleanála.”
