Insider:How is Edinburgh Airport investing for the future?
Dewar: We were planning on spending about £70m a year during 2021/22. We spent around £20m last year just finishing off all the projects that were in flight and we'll spend about £10m this year and I suspect we'll spend another £10m again next year.
We will clearly not be at capacity for a while. We have an airport that's capable of dealing with about 80 million passengers and at the moment we've got less than four million. Even in 2019 we only had 15 million. So we've always had a capacity issue that would be maybe half of the overall investment in the year for new capacity.
We're looking at a solar farm, because we want to be a lot more sustainable around our energy provision. So we're not we're not sitting around doing nothing. But clearly, we've got to justify the spend based on giving us a real meaningful return, despite having much lower passenger numbers.
Insider:Are there any plans to expand the flight routes or update the airspace?
Dewar: We've been looking at updating airspace for a number of years now, which is obviously quite a contentious issue for many.
What we can't avoid is modernisation. The existing airspace uses old technology of beacons, which will be phased out in the coming years, and we'll have to go on to the equivalent of sat nav for planes.
Even if the routes looked almost identical, we'd have to change them under legislation so that we can use new modern aviation technology.
We’ll be looking to improve a number of things, making sure that we're flying in places that minimises noise and reducing fuel burn for environmental reasons.
Insider:Is the airport still considering adding a new runway?
Dewar: We've got a projection for a second runway on the north side, which has been in the planning process for decades.
Even before Covid, we thought we wouldn’t need it probably until the 2040s. But there's clearly an awful lot more we can do on that single runway before we run out of capacity.
By 2040 there will be electric and hydrogen planes flying about. You might need to do different designs of airports to accommodate different technologies. Maybe they'll be slower to get off the ground or they'll be bigger; I don't know.
Insider:What sort of other new technologies are you investing in?
Dewar: I think the whole customer experience is clearly accelerating to digital, even more so now people want less physical contact.
We can foresee an entirely digital journey where you never need to get your document from your pocket and any paper out. It will come in different stages and depends on what individual airlines want to do with their technology and so on.