Sydney's new status as a two-airport city is already causing confusion for some travellers, with passengers arriving at Western Sydney International Airport on Monday morning saying they had been unaware that their flights were landing there.
The airport, which has been decades in the making and cost $5.6 billion, began operating passenger flights on Sunday.
One traveller had flown to Melbourne from Sydney Airport for the weekend and was surprised to discover that her return flight landed at the new airport, leaving her car parked on the other side of the city. Another, arriving from Auckland on Monday morning, said he had taken "Western Sydney" to mean Western Australia, and had been intending to go to Perth.
The distance is not trivial in practice, because the rail link is not finished. A metro service from St Marys to the airport was not completed before the airport opened, leaving buses and a free shuttle operating to and from the station as the main public transport options until the line opens.
Travellers who need to cross the city are not well served for now. One passenger said the journey from the new airport to Sydney Airport would take two hours, and was hoping instead that a friend with a car would collect her.
Three domestic Jetstar flights were scheduled for Monday, with Air New Zealand flights in the morning marking the first international departure and arrivals.
Seven carriers have signed up to operate out of the airport. Flights to Singapore are scheduled to start soon, with other destinations including Nadi in Fiji, Ho Chi Minh City and Doha to follow.
Some of the first passengers to travel through the airport have praised the new terminal's layout and operation. The confusion reported on Monday concerned the name on the boarding pass rather than anything inside the building.
That name is where this newspaper would like to dwell, because it has been read as a bearing rather than an address, and on inspection it is one.
Sydney Airport is a place. Western Sydney International is a direction with a city attached, and a direction does not specify how far to go. A passenger who sets off west from the terminal building and keeps going is not departing from Western Sydney. He is extending it.
On that reading the traveller who expected Perth had made no error at all. He simply applied the name at full scale. Perth lies west of Sydney; Western Australia lies west of Western Sydney; the boarding pass was not inaccurate, merely under-specified.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has examined the only clause that could settle the matter and finds it absent. Nowhere on the ticket is a distance given. Nowhere is "western" bounded. The convention in aviation is that an airport is named for the place it serves, and this one serves everybody heading that way.
Our analysts note that the rail link strengthens the case rather than weakening it. Until the metro from St Marys is finished, the airport is connected to the city in its name by road alone, which leaves the word "Sydney" doing much the same work as the word "western": describing a relationship rather than a location.
The airport is not in the wrong place, and the name was not wrong either. It was a bearing, and it was followed exactly.