Flying over the harbour and into Sydney Kingsford Smith airport, the dazzling view of blue ocean lapping at the city’s heart makes the claustrophobia of a window seat tolerable.
For the 100,000-odd travellers who must endure some hectic combination of snaking queues, overpriced cafes, overweight bags and violated personal space before either arriving into or departing the city each day, the fleeting vista of a glistening Sydney stands out.
But, hidden from travellers, a “mini-city” powers Australia’s busiest airport, where more than 30,000 people work every day. Some operate intricate networks of luggage conveyor belts , others ferry cargo to and from planes or pump hundreds of thousands of litres of jet fuel into jumbos in a matter of minutes.
Then there are those working to secure air travel. Aside from sky marshals and border security officials, there are intelligence workers researching potentially crooked airline workers, and agents with dogs trained to sniff out hard drives, memory cards and other smuggled contraband.
While travellers will see officers with tasers and rifles, most will be unaware of the birdwatchers with shotguns, or the plane watchers in the air traffic control tower whose sole responsibility is to count aircraft movements with a pen and clipboard.
Then there are those who don plastic gloves before sifting through a potentially hazardous bag of lost sex toys.
Eye on the sky
For a facility that relies on more than 800 businesses and organisations coordinating with military precision, having Greg Hay as the airport’s general manager of operations makes sense, given he previously served in the air force.
A big part of Hay’s morning is studying weather reports, and not just for Sydney.
“Weather is a key player here,” Hay says. “A typhoon up around the Hong Kong region can cause a great amount of strife for the schedule here.”
On windy days, air traffic controllers must change the direction the airport’s two runways operate in.
Inclement weather can wreak havoc on Sydney Airport due to the strict curfew that halts commercial passenger traffic between 11pm and 6am to give nearby residents reprieve from loud noise.
The airport, built 104 years ago just 8km from the CBD, is also slot-constrained, meaning there can be no more than 80 take-off or landing movements an hour, counted in 15-minute chunks.
If weather conditions at distant airports delay inbound flights or local storms hold up outbound planes, there’s very little give in the schedule.
“All it takes is a few things to start putting some of those intricate details out of whack,” Hay says.
The curfew and hourly movement cap are tightly policed. Airlines that break the curfew without permission are hit with a $313,000 fine, and to ensure the hourly limit is respected, there are monitors who sit in the air traffic control tower marking movements with pens and clipboards.
The airport’s outgoing chief executive, Geoff Culbert, pleaded for the government to modernise its laws and slot system. The airport doesn’t have the power to allocate slots to airlines.
He says a fear of breaching the law means the airport is routinely limiting movements below even the legal 80 an hour limit.
Culbert is also among aviation figures who have accused Qantas, Jetstar and Virgin Australia of “slot hoarding” by scheduling more services than they intend to operate to block competitors, then strategically cancelling the extra flights.
Cancellation rates out of Sydney are routinely the highest in the nation, and critics point to this as proof of slot misuse, though major airlines have repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
The federal government is yet to respond to a review recommending reforms to the laws. In the meantime, Hay must ensure the facility runs smoothly even during times of high disruption. He says on days with particularly bad weather, it can feel like a race to get all flights in and out before the curfew kicks in.
Organised chaos
In the period from 14 December last year to 3 January, 2.6 million passengers were estimated to have travelled through the airport’s terminals, a sign the pandemic recovery is complete.
“It’s a really busy week for us the week before Christmas,” Hay says. “The check-in halls are heaving, we’ve got passengers everywhere.”
In December, 3m pieces of luggage travelled through an intricate system in the basement of terminals that delivers suitcases from conveyor belts at check-in desks through security screening to their correct planes.
“They go through a security scan, they then go into a big sorter that determines what flight, a little bit like the end of Toy Story 2 where there’s lots and lots of bags going around, you know, in almost an underground roller coaster set-up here,” Hay says.
Bags are allocated to containers and taken to aircraft. An unofficial commemorative wall of bag tags that have fallen off through this process represents a fraction of the pieces that are ultimately mishandled or lost.
Hays says most don’t realise the scale of staff – more than 30,000 each day – needed to keep the airport running. This includes ground handlers, cleaners, engineers and caterers.
“People often describe the airport as a mini city,” he says.
One of Hay’s senior colleagues, Bjorn Nielsen, the manager of the airside operating licence and aviation safety, deals with less visible tasks.
Keeping birds away from planes is an important safety issue. US Airways flight 1549 famously struck a flock of birds minutes after taking off from New York’s LaGuardia airport in 2009, forcing it to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River.
Wildlife management teams monitor the grassy areas bordering the runways. They’ll use sirens, loud noises, pyrotechnics, a gas cannon, and even speakers mimicking the distress call of different species to shoo birds away. If all that fails, Nielsen says teams can use firearms to keep birds away from plane engines.
“Everyone sort of thinks the best way is just go out there with a shotgun or pistol … it’s the last resort. We will do it, but there are certainly better ways,” he says.
Lost property
In 2022, more than 4,000 pieces of lost property were returned to their owners, while about 3,000 unclaimed items were auctioned off, something the airport does each year to raise money for charity.
Most of the lost property it holds is mundane – stray toothbrushes and toiletries left behind in bathrooms, duty-free alcohol, laptops and jewellery. But special edition Beatles records, circular saw, hedge trimmer and sun lounge were among the more peculiar items auctioned off last year.
Katrina Lee takes charge of lost property in her role as airport service centre manager.
“There are some more colourful items that we find … personal pleasure items,” Lee says. “We had one bag that was completely full of items of that nature, and the lady who rang up about it … she had no qualms about ringing.
“[When] they’re what floats your boat, you want them back.”
Lee jokes that with such discoveries, staff are careful to don protective wear: “They sort of open it up and make a decision on whether or not this is a glove bag.”
Sniffing out crime
While the TV show Border Security may put border force officers in the limelight, the Australian federal police have a significant task overseeing law enforcement at the airport.
The most visible arm of the AFP at the airport is its canine team that can sniff out drugs and explosives. However, their evolution to detect cash and digital contraband has put enforcement on the front foot against organised crime.
“They’re very exciting, they can find anything from a phone to a micro sim, which is pretty tiny,” says Sen Const Jade Wall. She says cryptocurrency, child abuse material, money laundering and terrorism planning data are the main concern for smuggled hard drives and data cards, which the trained dogs can detect even deep in luggage.
Most threats, however, are down to passenger behaviour.
In fact, inside the AFP’s headquarters at the airport, there’s a mock plane cabin where officers can practice apprehending unruly passengers in their seats. It’s fitted with a business class section, too.
“I can tell you, some of them do come from business class, they certainly do,” says Det Supt Morgen Blunden, the AFP airport police commander.
“Alcohol, certainly, if it’s not the main or only cause, it makes a situation that might otherwise be resolved without incident a lot worse.”
If travellers resist arrest, tasers can be deployed. While most will be familiar with tasers being used from a distance to fire prongs that send an electric current through the central nervous system, the Guardian understands the devices can also be jammed into muscle at shorter range.
While officers at the airport carry a standard issue Glock handgun, some are trained to use larger rifles, such as the Daniels Defense MK 18. Officers must constantly train and retrain to use them.
Deterrence against terrorist activity is a key reason for the very visible short barrelled rifles.
“The more we can market the capabilities that we have, hopefully the message gets out that ‘I won’t do anything at the airport,’” Blunden said.
There are also plenty of desk-bound officers at the airport, including intelligence staff tasked with identifying and preventing what are known as “trusted insiders”: employees of airlines who use their access to aid organised crime.
Police even maintain a presence throughout the curfew periods. “It doesn’t entirely shut down,” Blunden said. “It’s a huge job.”
