Williamtown (Newcastle Airport) Airspace and Civil Flight Path Review

We are pleased to advise that the final design of the Williamtown (Newcastle Airport) Airspace and Civil Flight Path Review will be implemented on 30 November 2023.

The Final Outcome Report (available here) outlines the flight path and airspace design development journey, from preliminary design engagement through to the final design, including how community inputs assisted in shaping the final design.

A Post Implementation Review (PIR) will be completed 12 to 18 months after the date of implementation to compare actual operations data with forecasts modelled during final flight path design. The PIR will seek to identify if operations are consistent with the forecasts identified throughout design development, along with any feasible improvement opportunities. Subscribing to this page will ensure you receive email updates about this process as it progresses.

The final design for the Williamtown Airspace has now been approved by CASA. We had originally anticipated that the proposed changes would come into effect mid-2023, however in order to ensure these changes are properly incorporated into operational procedures for our staff and the aviation industry, the flight path changes will now come into effect on 30 November 2023.

The Newcastle and Hunter Valley communities are invited to participate in an online community briefing on the final design for the Williamtown Airspace and Civil Flight Path Review. The briefing will take place via Webex at 7pm on Monday 17 October 2022.

This online briefing will allow community members to understand how the community engagement on the preliminary design has shaped the outcomes of the final design including our assessments and the outcomes of community suggested improvements.

To attend the briefing, please complete the registration form here. Please ensure that you register for the briefing as numbers will be limited. If you would like to ask a question for discussion at the meeting, please add your question when you register.

EDIT: Note changed location for shopping centre pop up in Salamander Bay Square Shopping Centre.

Airservices recently released the preliminary design for our Williamtown (Newcastle Airport) Airspace and Civil Flight Path Review.

Thank you to the community for your meaningful feedback on the review.

We have now utilised this feedback to enhance the final design, where safe and operationally feasible, to ensure the best-possible outcomes for local residents.

Outcomes of these suggestions are detailed in the Community Suggested Improvements Fact Sheets here.

Our Airservices team will now be returning to the Newcastle and Hunter Valley areas to inform the community about the final design.

We will be available at shopping centre pop-ups across the region in October:

Wednesday 12 October 2022

10am-3pm: Market Place Raymond Terrace (centre court, in front of Big W)

Thursday 13 October 2022

10am-1pm and 3pm-7pm: Stockland Green Hills (ground floor, opposite Just Jeans)

Friday 14 October 2022

10am-3pm: Belmont Central Shopping Centre (opposite Woolworths)

Saturday 15 October 2022

10am-3pm: Salamander Bay Square Shopping Centre (In front of Woolworths)

An online community consultation session will also be hosted on Monday 17 October at 7pm for residents who would like to learn more about the final design, including the community suggested improvements.

To register for this online session, subscribe to this page. Invitations will be sent to all subscribers in October.

Thank you to the communities of Newcastle and the greater Hunter Valley for your comments and suggestions relating to Airservices’ Williamtown (Newcastle Airport) Airspace and Civil Flight Path Review.

We are continuing to work through the community feedback we received in the preliminary airspace design consultation and will finalise the design accordingly to ensure the best-possible outcomes for local residents.

We expect to be able to release the finalised design shortly and will provide an update on this as soon as we can.

We will also be returning to the area to discuss the design with the community over the coming months. Keep an eye on this page for dates and locations.

Thank you for your patience as we work through your feedback and the updated design.

Airservices is committed to ensuring our engagement with communities regarding these airspace and flight path changes is proactive, open and transparent.

Following on from our series of community consultation sessions held across the Newcastle and Hunter region last month, residents who were unable to attend an in-person session are invited to participate in a virtual community consultation session to be held on Thursday 11 August at 7pm.

Click here to register your attendance.

If you have a question you would like answered at the session, please submit via our Questions and Feedback tab on this page.

We have uploaded new google maps for each LGA showing the location of the proposed flight paths overlaid on a google earth image so townships and other landmarks can be seen. A zoom function exists for these maps, however we are also creating additional maps that provide a higher resolution image at several locations. We anticipate uploading these early next week.

We have temporarily removed the google map images we posted on this page yesterday due to some technical issues that have been identified. We will endeavour to replace these in the next 24 hours and will send an alert to all registered users when this has been completed.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thank you to community members that attended our first week of drop-in consultation sessions. If you have not yet been to a session, please review the locations advised in our post dated 29 June 2022.

We will also be at Stockland Green Hills Shopping Centre (opposite the newsagency) in East Maitland on Friday 29 July between 11am and 2pm.

Please note, these sessions can be visited at any time during the advised period as they are designed to be drop-in discussion sessions rather than formal presentations.

Following feedback received in our sessions last week, we have added some additional maps showing the proposed flight paths overlayed on google maps. These can be accessed to the right for each Local Government Area.

We welcome all feedback and encourage any community member with an interest in the proposed new flight paths for Newcastle Airport to provide your comments here. Questions can also be submitted using this link.

Following on from feedback gained during the early engagement phase in 2021, we have developed a preliminary airspace and flight path design for Williamtown (Newcastle Airport).

Where operationally safe, flight paths have been designed to minimise impacts to communities, particularly in relation to aircraft noise. Where residential areas cannot be avoided, we have attempted to design the airspace so operations can be distributed and noise shared, and to avoid the most populated areas of these communities, where possible. Noise impact assessments have been undertaken to identify the levels of aircraft noise that may potentially be experienced in different communities.

Fact sheets on the specific changes in each Local Government Area (LGA) have been prepared to provide details of the changes being proposed, the altitude of aircraft in these locations, forecast noise levels and projected frequency of operations. Each LGA fact sheet also summarises the feedback we received from the community in 2021 which was incorporated into the preliminary design where possible. These fact sheets can be found in the Documents section of this page.

The proposed preliminary airspace design is now available for community review and comment. We will consider all feedback received as we finalise the design. Where possible, we will make changes to the proposed design to address community concerns or areas of interest, however it is not possible to guarantee any suburb, group or individual exemption from aircraft noise exposure.

We will be hosting a series of community consultation sessions in the local area from 18 July 2022. These sessions will give local residents an opportunity to find out more about the preliminary design from our technical experts and provide feedback.

Note: these sessions are not structured formal meetings, rather drop-in style sessions where community members can have one-on-one conversations with Airservices staff.

Community consultation session schedule:

Click here to register your attendance at one of our sessions.