London City & Toronto Billy Bishop: City airports – functional, valuable, but not universally loved

There are few commercial airports anywhere in the world that can genuinely be referred to as 'downtown' airports and fewer still that are STOL ports (short take-off and landing) only. The recent sale of London City Airport to a consortium including the Canadian pension fund OMERS, has focused attention on these airports. This is because OMERS is also an investor in the Billy Bishop Toronto City airport in its home base of Ontario, Canada, through an investment by its infrastructure division Borealis Infrastructure in Porter Aviation Holdings. Porter Holdings manages the terminal there through a sale and leaseback deal. It may be the only example of one investor having equity in two of these airports.

Apart from ownership commonality, the other thing that links these two city centre airports is politics.

This report examines the relative attributes of these almost unique airports by reference to a range of statistics. It seeks to contrast the two of them from an operational, political and investment perspective, ultimately posing the question: which of them actually is the better investment.