Ibaraki Airport – a $268 million ‘useless project’
Bloomberg news isn’t very impressed with the new airport under construction in Ibaraki Prefecture:
Ibaraki’s airfield will open just as Japan’s biggest international airport, Narita, an hour’s drive to the south, completes an expansion. Tokyo’s Haneda airport, the world’s fourth-busiest, is set to open a new runway the same year.
“We’re not planning any flights from Ibaraki Airport,” Japan Airlines President Haruka Nishimatsu said on Dec. 2. “It’s out of the question.”
His company and All Nippon have cut unprofitable local routes and slashed profit forecasts this year as higher jet-fuel prices and a global economic slowdown led to fewer passengers.
Japan Air recorded its biggest decline in international passengers in five years in September, while All Nippon flew fewer people overseas for a seventh straight month.
“We don’t think of the airport as a Field of Dreams,” Ibaraki Governor Masaru Hashimoto said in an interview, referring to the movie starring Kevin Costner about an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield.
The film’s theme, “Build it and they will come,” mirrors the governor’s argument that investors won’t appear unless infrastructure is in place. “We want the airport to add to the long-term economic growth of the region,” he said.
Ibaraki is hoping to attract discount airlines from other Asian countries, but the lack of train service to the airport hardly makes it an attractive destination.
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