Sydney opens second airport 60 km from city, with no rail link and few airlines

A second airport after decades of argument

Sydney opened its second major airport over the weekend of 24 and 25 October 2026. The Western Sydney International Airport (WSI) lies about 60 kilometres from the centre of the Australian metropolis. That is far beyond Kingsford Smith, which has operated for more than 100 years and sits roughly eight kilometres from the centre. Kingsford Smith must close from 23:00 each night to most passenger aircraft, while the new airport stays open around the clock. The new airport was built from 2018 at a cost of several billion and is meant to relieve the chronically overloaded aviation infrastructure of the metropolis.

Western Sydney International Airport60

Kingsford Smith Airport8

Western Sydney International Airport

60 km

Kingsford Smith Airport

8 km

Data from the article text

Passengers land at the wrong airport

Almost as soon as the first passengers had landed, the first wrong turns followed. Two 23-year-old Swedish students had flown back from Melbourne to Sydney after a weekend trip. They had read 'Sydney West' on their boarding passes and assumed it meant another terminal at the familiar airport, they told the broadcaster ABC. When they looked out of the window, they did not recognise the surroundings, and an internet search had not set them straight. They had landed at WSI, almost an hour's drive from the car they had left at Kingsford Smith. A New Zealander who wanted Perth in Western Australia also ended up in the wrong place after reading 'Western' on his ticket. He realised the error only once he was already on his way to Western Sydney International on the east coast, and he took it calmly, saying he was on holiday and could make the best of the mistake.

Few airlines and no rail link yet

So far only the low-cost carrier Jetstar and Air New Zealand fly into the new airport. Singapore Airlines, Qatar and Fiji Airways are due to follow next year. The planned rail connection into the city is not finished, so passengers must use buses and shuttle services for the time being. According to Der Tagesspiegel, the airport opened without a metro line and a control tower, and with few staff. Travellers were advised to check the airport name as well as the city name when booking a flight to Sydney.

Decades of dispute and a short build

Whether Sydney needed a second airport has been contested since 1946. In 2014 the government chose Badgerys Creek in the west of the city of five million as the site, and construction began four years later. Rico Merkert of the University of Sydney, a German aviation expert, points to the comparatively short construction period of seven years, which came after such a long argument. The timeline below shows the main milestones from the first debate to the opening.