A project for shifting some traffic, especially charters and holiday flights, from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to a smaller field at Lelystad has seemingly risen from the dead, at least in the mind of the Netherlands Infrastructure minister.
Barry Madlener of Infrastructure hopes to open Lelystad Airport for holiday flights next year, telling reports that “A lot has been invested in it. I think it would be a shame if such an investment turns out to have been for nothing.”
The plan to save capacity at Schiphol for long-haul and especially transfer flights has been around for about a dozen years, always facing strong opposition from, at different times and sometimes all together, environmentalists, airlines and local residents.
The field, originally built in the 1970s for private planes and sports flying, has had some expansion and is capable of handling planes such as the A320 or 737, but the project has appeared dead since the beginning of the pandemic.
Unlike Schiphol, which is served by frequent trains and is 20 minutes from Amsterdam’s Centraal station, Lelystad is an hour and 20 minutes away.
The parties in the right-wing coalition now in power in the Netherlands are split over the issue, and in January the lower house of parliament passed a resolution against opening the airport, but at least one of the parties, representing a farmer bloc, says it is open to reconsideration.
The farmer party, BBB, says the airport would use up nitrogen space, which it wants to preserve for farming; the Netherlands is already buying up and idling some farmland to meet its goals. But a BBB leader told Dutch press that “As soon as new insights emerge, we will take stock. And then we could come to a different conclusion.”
Local opposition has focused on noise levels that would rise; a recent report claims that previous reports underestimated how much noise would be created. Airline opposition has come from carriers that would be forced to shift from Schiphol.
