At 8:50 in the morning on Friday, June 16, five planes were scheduled to land at the Alicante-Elche-Miguel Hernández airport: four Airbuses from Zurich (Air Baltic), Rome (Vueling), Paris (Vueling ), Cluj-Napoca (Romania, Wizz) and a TUI Boeing 737 from Brussels.
With only one runway, you don’t have to be a pilot or controller to understand that they didn’t all land at the same time, but taking into account that at 8:45 a.m. -five minutes earlier- two other flights from Paris and Liège were scheduled to enter , and five minutes later another from Amsterdam, it is easy to understand the hustle and bustle of the air that we privileged people watched as they followed the descent, in single file, of these giants of the air from a cafeteria on the neighboring Saladar beach over a coffee with milk and a oil toast.
Because the Alicante-Elche airport does not stop breaking movement records. By the time those five flights landed within a few minutes and in an orderly shift, between 8:50 and 9:00 a.m., 25 flights had already taken off from the Alicante aerodrome, the first at 6:00 a.m. In total, about 150 landings and as many takeoffs in a single day. More than a million and a half passengers in the month of May, more than ever in that month, approaching a summer that promises to overflow the statistical graphs by the upper margin.
The figures and the passenger forecast, triggered after the stoppage caused by the pandemic, are the argument that the business sector, especially the hotel sector, have used this week to expose the AENA management that the time has come to undertake the work of the second runway provided for in the Airport Master Plan.
The president of Hosbec, Fede Fuster, explains that “Alicante Airport lives mainly from international traffic, which accounts for 85% of the total number of passengers and is breaking absolute records of operations and passengers every month, so all the planning of the necessary infrastructures, as will be the second track”. Between June and September, the Miguel Hernández Airport will operate 14,700 flights, which is equivalent to 3.5 million seats.
Let us not forget that, as regards the loading and unloading facilities, when the new terminal was built, the old one was kept standing in order to reopen it, with the necessary reforms, when the increase in operations requires it. But, as the CEV and Hosbec informed the executives of the aeronautical entity, the volume of passengers that it is not possible to assume with a single runway is close to being reached, so the execution of the second should be imminent.
However, the project does not lack opponents whose arguments are also strongly linked to the conservationist trend of a society increasingly concerned about the consequences of climate change.
In the allegations presented to the Aena plan, the environmental group AHSA (Friends of the Wetlands of the South of Alicante) opposed the second track for a local and very specific reason, “the occupation of land in the Agua Amarga salt marsh and its affected basin, a humid zone protected since 2002 through the Catalog of Wet Zones of the Valencian Community, due to the critical and severe impacts that the destruction of ecosystems protected by both national and European legislation would entail”.
And secondly, “because the construction of a second runway will significantly contribute to the increase in air traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, an unaffordable increase taking into account the climate change forecasts linked to these emissions.”
With regard to the first objection, the environmental organization recalls that “the environmental value of the associated ornithological species is very high, taking into account that the Mediterranean coastal wetlands are ecosystems in serious regression due to intense anthropic pressure and that many of the Both botanical and faunal species associated with these ecosystems are in a compromised situation”.
The NGO points out that “it is of vital importance to preserve those natural spaces that have been preserved from the intense urbanization process suffered on our coasts, as is the case of the Agua Amarga Salt Lake.” In his opinion, its high biological diversity, especially with regard to birdlife, “is not sufficiently included in the environmental characterization section” of the project.
Regarding the second aspect, AHSA argues that “in the current climate emergency situation that the planet is experiencing due to the effects of climate change, continuing to promote actions that favor one of the most polluting types of transport that exist, such as commercial aviation, is completely irresponsible. A single traveler traveling from London to New York on a commercial flight is estimated to emit as many greenhouse gases as the average European to heat their home for a year, according to European Union data.”
In addition, “the consequences of climate change are being especially impactful in our country and even more so in the southeast of the peninsula, where droughts are more frequent and intense and the duration of summers has increased by five weeks since the 1980s, as reflected in the progress of the data from the Climatic Open Data of the Spanish Meteorological Agency”.
The ecologists add that part of the land that AENA plans to use is in a flood zone, in a sector “extremely sensitive to the rise in the level of the Mediterranean Sea caused by climate change, which further discourages the installation of strategic infrastructures.”
