Somewhere around fifteen years ago in Spain.....some government guys got together on a project to mostly spend money. No one says much now over the intended value or how the location would draw people.....but the original crew had this idea that several million passengers would pass through this airport in the middle of nowhere.
Ciudad Real Central Airport is in the southern quarter of Spain.....at least two hours from Madrid and probably the same amount of distance from the coastal region where people go for vacations. Maybe if it'd been designed as a small airport....this might have worked to some degree. In the end, they went big.
The runway? It's 13,000 feet long....one of the longest in Europe. It was built to handle 10 million passengers a year. They even built a connecting bridge from the airport which was to lead out around 1,000 feet to a railway terminal that connected to the link between Madrid and Seville. Sadly, the terminal was never built. No one explains why but it seems like the money got turned off when they realized the airport had no value.
For roughly four years (starting in 2010).....they tried to run the airport. It was a complete disaster in terms of building it and expecting some tourism angle to just take over. By 2013, it was shut down....they couldn't sustain a profit.
Why does this come up in discussion? Well....it went into a bankruptcy court and it had to be sold. They were hoping on a bid of thirty-million Euro (a billion Euro investment to start with). From the Spanish news folks.....they say the current bid is 10,000 Euro.....way under the minimum.
The bidder? A Chinese company. What is generally said is that they want a big runway and the terminal area for a cargo enterprise. There's going to be a bit of renovation going on and the most they will bid is 10,000 Euro. Oddly, no one else bid on the airport.
I will occasionally point out incompetence in business and government. This is a case where the two met, and both dreamed up an airport with no value and spent a billion Euro to create it. The Chinese company will get it for ten thousand Euro, an unbelievable deal.
My prediction? In three years.....Spaniards wake up and realize that forty Chinese cargo planes are landing each week and off-loading goods to dump onto the Spanish market. Not only did they contribute money to build the stupid airport which they gave away, but they invited the Chinese to market their goods in the middle of Spain.
No comments:
Post a Comment