I have. It is a good way to summarise where we are at, so I thank the committee for that opportunity.
It is good to be here. I thank the committee for the invitation to be here. I was unable to come the first time I was invited, because there were two topics that I do not think I would have been able to talk in depth about, and that would have been frustrating for the members. It is now a couple of months later, and we have started the busy summer period, so I am also able to give members a better description of where we are, and how we see the very busy summer that we will operate through in the weeks ahead.
I am going to take the committee through a presentation. This will take a maximum of 12 to 15 minutes. It will answer some questions and give members a really good flavour of the key things going on in Dublin Airport and Cork Airport and across the wider business. I am very happy to dive in at the end and take any questions members may have.
This presentation will cover general background, a Dublin Airport update, a Cork Airport update, sustainability and infrastructure in the coming years at Dublin Airport, conclusions, where we are at, and how the business will travel forward. Then I will outline some key asks I would have of the committee. From our point of view, we want to grow the business, make it innovative and give a much better passenger experience as we grow the business in the years ahead.
This slide is a great one for Ireland. It shows the position we have in global aviation. The DAA group operates in 15 countries. We are managing five airports: Dublin Airport, Cork Airport, half of King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the big terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, and we will manage the soon-to-open Red Sea International Airport on the northern coast of Saudi Arabia. We have travel retail operations in 27 different airports, and we employ around 3,500 staff. Members can see some historic former Aer Rianta locations when it comes to retail, but for me this is a really good slide that demonstrates the strength of Irish aviation between ourselves, the leasing industry, Aer Lingus and Ryanair. The Irish are very good at aviation, and we have garnered great respect around the world with regard to how we do aviation.
The next slide explains the economic impact for Ireland of the DAA's operations. Some 116,000 Irish jobs are facilitated by Dublin Airport, and about 10,000 jobs by Cork Airport. We account for over €5 billion in wages in the Irish economy. We make an economic contribution of €9.6 billion in Dublin, and another €1 billion in Cork. We spend around €227 million on Irish suppliers each year. There is a very significant economic contribution from the DAA group here in Ireland.
Moving on to Dublin Airport, I would describe it as a positive performance year to date. We have 190 destinations, more than we have ever had, and 44 airlines in this coming summer. We have recently added Montreal and Vancouver as routes that are being restored post Covid-19, which is exciting news. The Dublin to Beijing route will be operated by Hainan Airlines from China. There are 1,400 flights each week across 30 European cities, and 180 flights each week to the USA. Dublin is now the fifth best-connected transatlantic hub in Europe. We have around 600 flights a day - around 300 flights in, and 300 out - and more in terminal 1 than we have in terminal 2.
When members look at the map, they will see very good coverage. Of course, there are places I would love us to fly to in the coming years, South America being one, India being another. More connectivity to south-east Asia would also be really interesting. We are very strong anywhere into Europe, and very strong anywhere into North America.
Security is strong and stable. The last time I was here at the committee, this was a topic that we spent a lot of time on. I am happy to say that we have really applied our focus to this. For me, the real heroes in Dublin Airport are the operational and security staff who have really put in a very strong performance. We are in a good place, and the operation is stable. The passenger experience, including the time that, critically, is spent getting through security, is and will continue to be the number one focus.
Queue times are stable since the summer of 2022. May 2023 was our busiest month ever in Dublin Airport. We had 3.05 million passengers, 95% of them getting through Dublin Airport in less than 20 minutes. I am delighted to be able to say that. That would be a really strong performance from any major hub airport across Europe. We see that in the feedback we get from passengers and airlines. We are in a markedly different place when it comes to the operating standards at the airport, everything from washrooms, to seating, to being able to get tea, coffee and food. Principally, the biggest thing that annoyed people last year was the anxiety that was created on how long it was going to take them to get through security. Some 95% got through in May 2023 in less than 20 minutes, and 99.5% of passengers, this year to date, have got through security in less than 30 minutes. We are in a very different place.
We are well resourced to meet the demand coming up to the summer. We are now coming into the third weekend of the summer, and every single day in June is a day with over 100,000 passengers. This weekend will be our third big weekend. For me, these are all cup final weekends, but the team is in a very good place and very motivated. We have got very good momentum, and as I said, for me the heroes in this story are the members of the team at Dublin Airport.
We now have 850 people in our security team. The last time I was at the committee, I said we were aiming to hire up to 811, so we have gone over that number. We have improved pay and conditions for the team. For me, it is a very well-motivated team. I can see that every single day when I am up in the terminal. The biggest thing that motivates them is every one of the green days, when one is getting 90% or more of people through security in 20 minutes, and everything else goes well from there to the gate.
We have hired 500 security officers since the start of the year, including 150 seasonal people, who will not be doing the screening and looking at what is in passengers' bags on the screen. They will be doing what we call divesting. Many of these will be students from Dublin City University, DCU, from other parts of Dublin and from other universities, who will be wearing the pink vest and advising passengers that on certain lanes they take liquids out of their bag, and on other lanes they do not.
We ran radio ads about six weeks ago telling the travelling public to please be at the airport two hours before they fly if they are flying short-haul from Dublin, and three hours beforehand if they are flying long-haul. That is back to general pre-Covid-19 travel advice. That is a very good place to be. Last year we were telling people to come to the airport four hours before they were flying. In hindsight, that was not necessary. We ended up with a lot of families sitting on the terrazza waiting for their Ryanair or Aer Lingus flight to somewhere in Spain. It is back now to business as usual. The summer will be a challenge. Big numbers are coming through. There are particular Fridays and Sundays and early mornings where we will have large numbers going through but we are ready. We have worked very hard over the past number of months to get ready. Some 425,000 people left Dublin Airport to go the sunshine on the June weekend and we performed very strongly. As I said, every day in June and July will be a 100,000-passenger day that we are ready for.
On security, members can view the diagrams I have provided but the longer term aim I have is that we make a passenger promise to get 90% of people through in less than 15 minutes. Part of that relates to the charge and being able to have the resilience baked into our profit and loss. A big part of that is the new technologies that will come into play. What I am talking about here are the C3 scanning machines. These are fantastic machines from a regulatory compliance point of view. They are very good from a processing and throughput point of view and for the general operation of security. This is like moving from X-ray machines to CAT scan machines. Passengers do not have to take the liquids out of their bags so it is a better passenger experience. It means fewer bags have to be siphoned off for manual check. Passengers will go through a walk-through metal detector and then about half of passengers will be selected for an additional body scan. It is a much more secure and much more future-proofed environment and it also gives us much better throughput and processing so as we grow at Dublin Airport we are able to also get through more passengers through security in faster timeframes using the best of technology, which is also good for compliance. We will be introducing these in Dublin in T1 and T2. We will also be introducing them in Cork. We now have five machines in place and are aiming to have these fully rolled out in T2 for the start of summer next year and then in T1 for the start of the following summer. That is a long enough timeframe because we need to do work reinforcing the floors. If members know what a CAT machine looks like, it is a much bigger piece of equipment than an X-ray machine. These are a key part of the innovation that will allow us to make Dublin and Cork airports much better for passengers and provide a much more seamless passenger experience. There will be a job to do explaining to people that they now do not need to take the liquids out of their bags but so far the five lines we have in Dublin Airport are working very well.
In the run-up to Easter, we announced a 15-point improvement plan for Dublin Airport. This is our commitment to get 90% of people through security in 20 minutes or less. We have added 400 new seats in Dublin Airport and we have added new family seating zones in T1 and T2. We have gone back to our pre-Covid-19 cleaning standards. We have 500 washrooms across T1 and T2 at Dublin. Those washrooms get 1,500 hours of cleaning every single day. We have permanent attendants in place at the most-used washrooms that we have in the airport and the scores we are getting from the passengers using the washrooms are much better. We have doubled the Wi-Fi capacity, therefore if people are waiting within the two- and three-hour travel advisory we have issued, they will be able to stream on their phones and on their iPads. That is a much better experience. A new security fast track has been doubled in T1. There are 20% more charging points for mobile devices. We are adding 25% more taxi permits by the end of this month which will get us close to 2,000 taxi permits at Dublin Airport. Nine out of ten passengers wait less than ten minutes for a taxi but there are particularly acute times such as on Sunday evenings when a lot of our flights are arriving back in and that is when the taxi queue will be at its worst. We would all acknowledge that we have a taxi shortage in Ireland. We are trying to get as many permits as we can issued at Dublin Airport and look at other transportation options to do everything we can to make that a better solution for passengers. We have added new places to eat, with more to come over the summer, and we have added pop-up coffee shops where people can get tea, coffee, water and food essentials at the end of pier 1 and in terminal 2.
Moving on to car parking, I think the members will have some questions on this one. We have 23,000 spaces at Dublin Airport and we are restricted from opening more for a number of reasons, of which Government policy on transport is one. Long-term car park spaces are capped at €15 per day; that is cheaper than four hours parking in the city centre. Hundreds of thousands of bookings made for this summer are for as little as €8 per day for car parking so there is a bit of a myth that it is really expensive. There is also a bit of a myth that people cannot get a car parking space. If someone goes on to the website today and wants to book a space for July and August, they will get one. If you are dropping or picking someone up from the airport this weekend, we have spaces reserved for short-term dropping and picking up of passengers. It is a much calmer and well operated situation when it comes to car parking. I do not think it is the drama that has been portrayed in the media. What is the number one thing I would like? More spaces. We would like to have the QuickPark spaces. If we get those 6,200 spaces, I will give a commitment that we will be operational probably within a week and we will be able to operate those spaces. Then we can say to the travelling public that many more of them will get a car park space. No airport can that say every single passenger group travelling will get a car park space. If we get those 6,200 spaces, our car park spaces to passenger ratio will be quite healthy for an airport. I think we will and it is just a matter of when we get them and when we can operate them. It is about getting those spaces as quickly as we can. If we get that green light, we will operate within a week. I hope that process concludes.
Last summer, we made an offer to the owners of the QuickPark site to operate that site. We have again made that offer while the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, process is running. The owners of the site say they do not want to do that. That is a question for them and that is their choice. We are ready to go as soon as we get the green light and our objective here is to have more spaces in order to take away the anxiety for the travelling public around car parking spaces in Dublin being a very rare commodity. I would like to reassure the committee that there are spaces available in July and August. There are other ways to get to the airport and that is the trajectory of travel in Ireland which we fully support. Dublin Airport is already the biggest bus station in the country and there are new bus routes being added. I have already explained what we are doing on taxi permits and we have the metro north station beside the church at the airport ready to go. We will continue to be fully supportive of metro north and BusConnects in the future as more people will go on their holidays and take public transport as the transportation choice to the airport.
Moving on to charges, I want to reiterate this point. People are asking if we have an ambition to become an expensive airport. We do not. We are not a monopoly. To be a monopoly, an organisation sets its prices and is milking it from its customers. As members will know, the price is set by an independent regulator. The average charge at Dublin Airport today is about €7.60. I am obviously contrasting that with someone paying €9 for a pint in Temple Bar. I also contrast it with €38 being the price of airport charges at Heathrow Airport. We never want to be a Heathrow. We never want to be a high-cost airport. We are a Lidl and Aldi when it comes to airport charges. The average charge at Dublin Airport is less than half of the European average airport charge. We would like to see a modest increase in airport charges so that we can guarantee a resilient year-round operation. If we get that charge up to something like €9.99, we are still well below the European average capital city airport charge. Let us be honest, Dublin is not a low-cost European capital city but we want to stay a very cheap airport for airlines because that is good for us. That is what our model is based on. We have very low operational expenditure and we want to continue to be a very efficient airport but it would allow us to have a very resilient operation and say to our passengers that we could give them a security queue of 15 minutes of less.
I am nearly there. I will quickly touch on drone technology which we did not talk about the last time but since then we have had a number of drone incidents. The Government requested that the DAA procure the counter-drone technology equipment as an interim solution. We purchased the kit in March. Our fire services team was trained and ready to go since early April. New regulatory approvals were then highlighted by the Irish Aviation Authority, IAA, from a safety point of view, and by ComReg from a radio frequency point of view. We have been working through those with the IAA and ComReg. I am happy to say that last week we passed the safety tests with the IAA and therefore I am optimistic we will get a green light in the coming weeks. There are three steps to counter-drone measures. The first is the de-drone perimeter system which is something that is working well and is an investment we have made a number of years ago. This tells you when a drone has come near the airfield. Then essentially the Airport Police Service and An Garda Síochána will respond.
That is working very well. We have apprehended a number of individuals and some individuals have been prosecuted for flying a drone within 5 km directly over the airfield. It is a good message to people engaging in this type of activity so they understand it is illegal and they should not do it. The second measure is the counter-drone technology the fire service is waiting to get the green light on. This will allow us to take control of a drone that is in the airfield and send it back where it came from. An Garda Síochána will then work with the airport fire service to apprehend any individual who was controlling that drone. We are weeks away. We have moved very quickly. We are pioneers on this as it is the first time Ireland is doing it. Ultimately we need to have counter-drone technology over Croke Park, Heuston Station, Dublin Port and over other airports. This is something that I would envisage being a problem in the years ahead that Ireland needs a solution for.
Moving on to Cork Airport, it will do about 2.7 million traffic this year. It is in a very healthy condition. New routes are being announced in Cork all the time. These would be new winter routes for Ryanair and new summer routes. I am happy to say that Ryanair and Aer Lingus are both growing at Cork Airport and we can see how traffic here has really recovered. Moving on to the next slide, we can see that Cork Airport is one of the best judged regional airports across Europe in the eyes of the passengers who use it. We are very appreciative of recent Government funding for the electrical substation. The C3 scanning technology I have already described will be installed in Cork over the years ahead. Ultimately, as Cork city and the region develop I see a very strong future for Cork Airport. There is very strong demand there as businesses locate in Cork and the population grows. We see great potential for Cork Airport to grow in a sustainable way in the years ahead. Moving on to our Cork regional airport policy submission, our key ask here is that the Irish state aid limits for regional airports are aligned with the relevant EU limits on operating aid and investment capital aid in the years ahead.
I will touch on sustainability and infrastructure before wrapping up. Aviation has to be and is part of the world's tackling the global challenge we face on sustainability. We have made a commitment to be net zero by 2050 and will cut our carbon emissions by more than half by 2030. We are introducing a solar farm at phase 1 and that project is under way. That will give us about 12% of our energy needs at Dublin Airport. These will be fields near the airstrip. We recently announced a 25% discount on airport charges for new quieter and cleaner aircraft, these being the Airbus neos or Boeing MAX aircraft. We strongly support airlines transitioning to sustainable aviation fuels. More needs to happen globally on sustainable aviation fuels. It is something that gets a lot of talk and it is part of the future but globally there is not enough sustainable aviation fuel to power the aircraft flying to and from Dublin Airport. A lot needs to happen with the fuel manufacturers. We will also achieve zero waste to landfill across our business by 2050. We are putting a strong focus on air quality, water, noise, biodiversity and local communities as part of our sustainability plan.
We have a €2 billion capital plan to grow and enhance the experience for passengers and airlines. A key element is the north apron, item 1 on the diagram. That is principally pier 1 where Ryanair is the main airline operating. The south apron will be a new pier and an extension to US pre-clearance. It will benefit all the airlines flying transatlantic and will allow us to have additional transatlantic frequencies, reduce some bottlenecks and improve things operationally. In the terminal there are plans for new C3 machines which I have described. There is a plan to extend the mezzanine in terminal 1. I assume everybody flies from time to time from terminal 1. There is that great upstairs area and we have a lot of space that we could use there. We intend to put fast-track up there, build a new lounge and have some new retail there. That allows us to fully utilise the terminal 1 asset as we intend to grow. It will give a much improved passenger experience as part of the work we see happening in terminal 1. In the airfield, we need an underpass for safety, operational and sustainability reasons. There are plans for new drainage infrastructure. Landside, we plan for public transport infrastructure, parking and new car hire facilities. It is a big capital infrastructure plan which is very much contingent on the infrastructure application we will be lodging later in the year.
My last slide is about key asks and dependencies. On national aviation policy, the ask is to support Dublin as a hub and increase connectivity. The last time I was at the committee, and I say this as someone from Cork, I said that really Dublin is the national airport. That is the way we should describe it. As a former aviation person, I would say that is the way the airlines view it as well. Dublin is a national hub that happens to be called Dublin Airport. Then we have the regional airports. I am a supporter of all of the regional airports operating well and growing well. We have to view Dublin Airport as being a different type of airport. It is Dublin's airport and Leinster's airport but it is also the national hub.
We need to rethink the regulatory model. I am not criticising the regulator. I am just saying that when it comes to the regulatory model, Dublin is a high-cost capital city. We have a regulated charge that is less than half of the European average. I can mention Sofia, Rome, Warsaw, or any European capital where they are talking about a much higher charge. That has a direct impact on our resilience, our infrastructure plan and the type of airport we want to operate for our passengers. We would also ask for support when it comes to non-aero investments, things like arrivals duty-free which we think will be a very interesting product in the years ahead. Another ask is reform of the planning legislation. Planning is central to infrastructure development. We all know that planning needs to go faster when it comes to housing but it also needs to go faster when it comes to infrastructure and sustainability. For Ireland to hit its sustainability targets, planning needs to work and deliver on time. We need to strike the right balance between sustainability and connectivity. I know the committee will have questions on this. We need to align national bodies and policies around that and get planning moving faster. A key thing for me is that Dublin Airport is capped at 32 million. The population of the Republic of Ireland today is 5.033 million. If for sustainability nobody travelled more and we all just continued doing the amount of travelling we are doing today, we would still need Dublin Airport at about 38 million just to keep pace with the population. The natural increase in capacity at Dublin Airport needs to get us to an airport of about 38 million by 2030, just to keep pace with our very strong population growth. That is a key fact that everybody needs to bear in mind. We can grow in aviation in a more sustainable way. I refer to newer aircraft; electric taxiing of the aircraft whereby they are electricity-powered when they are on the ground instead of using their engines; and running a very efficient airfield operation. All of these things matter and help when it comes to reducing the amount of carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre. Not all flying is the same. Not all flying is as bad as other types of flying. We certainly want to incentivise the right type of flying, which is newer aircraft and higher load factors - that is a much more efficient model. On surface access, we would highlight prioritisation of the key public transportation projects which will allow more people to use metro north and BusConnects to get to Dublin Airport. I thank the committee for the opportunity to present an overview of where we are for the summer. I am very happy to take questions from members.
