Avinor to uncork Flesland bottleneck

Traffic growth at Bergen airport in Norway has been strong in the past decade. So strong that check-in queues often stretch far past the terminal entrance. To alleviate the pressure, Avinor in Norway is now building a new terminal with enough capacity for ten million passengers a year, almost twice the current capacity.

The countdown has started—the new expanded terminal at Norway’s second largest airport, Flesland in Bergen, will be launched on 17 August 2017.

The expansion of Flesland has been widely announced in the region’s media and is being welcomed with high hopes. The airport is the main hub for air traffic in the counties of Hordaland and Sogn og Fjordane in western Norway with a population of 600,000 people. Expanding at a rate of 10 per cent a year over the past decade, this has been one of the country’s regions with the fastest growing population.

Business has showed sturdy growth in western Norway in recent years. Local enterprises, particularly in energy and sea transport, have altogether increased the number of employees by 17 per cent since 2000. This makes the region stand out against the national average of 11 per cent in the same period.

“The launch of an expanded airport terminal in Bergen will mean very much for the entire region of western Norway. If you look at the map, Bergen lies quite on the edge of both Europe and the rest of Norway. On a Friday, the queue for the airport check-in would extend outside the terminal”, says Arvid Møll, Head of Finance at Avinor, a state-owned company operating 46 airports in Norway.

A survey conducted among local businesses shows that the airport is essential for shipping, service and contact with customers and partners. Many in the business community are concerned that congestion due to insufficient airport capacity may cause serious delays and disruption in their operations and product development. Over half believe it will also lead to lost revenues and approximately half believe it will lead to lost contracts and customers.

“Avinor sees its role in making Norway and its regions more competitive and attractive for the development of business. We do our best to ensure high quality of airport operation”, Mr Møll continues.

“Our airports show good results when it comes to dealing with challenges like winter storms. It certainly attracts more competition among carriers, which means better, more competitive services for passengers, which contributes to a better economic climate and more employment.”

The terminal in use at Flesland opened in 1988 and expanded twice in the early 2000s. During the past ten years, the number of passengers using the airport has more than doubled, and it reached its maximum capacity, six million passengers, already two years ago. The number of tourists has been growing even faster—more than 20 per cent in recent years. Every tenth foreign tourist enters Norway through Flesland.

The new terminal will have a flexible and scalable form that will allow for more capacity of the check-in service, security and baggage handling. The airport’s surface area will expand almost fourfold, to 85,000 square metres. At basement level, the terminal will have a station of light rail offering passengers a 20-minute ride to Bergen.

The capacity of the new terminal, T3, will be enough to service up to 10 million passengers a year. The total costs of the construction project are set at NOK 4.7 billion (EUR 550 million). NIB is financing the new terminal with a 20-year, NOK 1 billion (EUR 111 million) loan to Avinor.

“The modernisation project will help meet future needs related to the increasing passenger turnover, which we expect to keep increasing at a pace of some three per cent pace in the coming years. NIB’s long-term financing on market terms provides us with what we need for investing in the sustainable development of public infrastructure”, Mr Møll concludes.