Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 18 January 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Transport, Tourism and Sport

National Aviation Policy: Dublin Airport Authority

Mr. Kenny Jacobs:

I will ask Mr. Harrison to cover that and touch on cargo and capacity. However, broadly speaking from an all-of-Ireland point of view, Dublin Airport is competing with the international hubs. The regional airports, which are all important, are competing with each other and long live both competitions.

I will touch on Dublin Airport and then Mr. Harrison will take the other point. Things need to improve. I look at terminal1 and terminal2. I go there every morning to see how the first wave is going. I cannot think of a European airport I have not gone through. I have many views on what works well and what does not. terminal1 is an old building. It is where the Ryanair flights leave from. It gets narrow in parts. I know what the key things are that need to work at an airport, such as parking and getting through security quickly. I do not want entering terminal 1 to be an anxious moment with passengers unable to see security wondering if there will be a big group of people. We want passengers to get through security in 20 minutes or less. We then want them to be able to walk to the piers, get everything they are looking for including clean toilets and for everything to be working.

We want clean terminals. We will do a bit of decluttering because if someone flies from T1 or T2 at this time of day, it will be a great experience. On Good Friday morning on an early morning flight to Lanzarote, it is a totally different thing. It is setting ourselves up for those big 20 outbound days that are cup final days for us where we are at our best. It is the constant grind of cleaning, staffing and security and making sure that it is a really efficient operation and ensuring that the right food and beverage options are there for our customers. We want to add more seats in T1 because we need them on those big mornings like Good Friday. There are plenty of things that we want to look at in T2 as well.

Regarding security, we are always doing time and motion studies to see what is the best way to do it. I have gone through nearly every European airport and you see security done well and done in different ways. We have to constantly be on the lookout for new technology that helps. The C3 scanners, for example, are good because people have to take fewer items out of their bags and that takes a bit of the stress away. They require more staff and more point of view and the footprint that they require is slightly different. The automatic tray return that was mentioned is another good thing that helps the process. Staffing levels and what the staff say to people as they are doing what we call divestment, which is taking stuff out of their bags, until we have the C3 scanners is very important. We have added a supervisor role in this past year. These are our most experienced security people who have worked the lanes who know what good looks like. They are the ones who marshal the process through. It really is about the early morning peak that we want to get right and having visible leadership there is very useful. They are great people and they perform an important role.

We are always looking at other airports and what is the best way to do it. In some ways, it is easier to do things in T2 because it has more space and more of the traffic goes through to T1 and we want the two products not to be totally dissimilar, because many passengers will use both terminals in a given year so we want them to be aligned. Like anything, it is into the constant grind of making sure that every single day is up to standard. There are bad days and we will have bad days next summer. Every airline will have bad days. It is about how quickly we can recover and improve that. We look at the technology to find the best to invest in so that we can make it a better process within the infrastructure we have. I will ask Mr. Harrison to address the point on cargo and the transit structure.

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