SEPTEMBER TRAFFIC FIGURES BAA’S AIRPORTS
10 October 2008BAA’s UK airports handled a total of 13.3 million passengers in September, 5.0% fewer than in the same month last year. Year to date, BAA´s UK airport traffic shows a decline of 1.4% for the nine months to September at a total of 113.4 million.
Markets saw reductions during the month with the largest being a 12.6% decrease in European charter traffic, partly as a result of the closure of XL Airways on the 12th of the month. North Atlantic traffic was down by 6.8% and other long haul routes by 6.0%. European scheduled traffic achieved the best result with a drop of just 2.2%.
Among individual airports Heathrow’s passenger total fell by 3.6% overall, despite a 9.6% increase in North Atlantic traffic. European scheduled traffic at Heathrow was down by 8.1%. Gatwick’s pattern was a mirror image of Heathrow with North Atlantic traffic 44.0% (mainly due to the introduction of the ‘Open Skies’ Agreement) lower but European scheduled up by 8.8%.
Stansted’s passenger total fell by 4.7% overall, with European scheduled traffic down by 2.9% and domestic by 0.8%. Southampton recorded a drop of 4.0% overall, with European scheduled traffic down 8.6%.
In Scotland, Edinburgh traffic was 2.9% lower and Aberdeen saw a 4.2% drop in passengers. The largest drop was at Glasgow (–11.0%) where the loss of XL and Zoom services exacerbated already weak Charter and North Atlantic results. In contrast its European scheduled traffic was 3.7% up on last year.
In total BAA’s airports recorded a 1.3% drop in air transport movements during September and a 2.3% reduction in air cargo tonnage. Despite the overall loss of cargo traffic, both Heathrow (+2.5%) and Stansted (+3.8%) recorded increases.
BAA remains of the view that the long-term growth prospects for aviation are good. Historically, air traffic growth recovers from short-term shocks such as those currently being played out in the financial markets, as evidenced by the growth in traffic after the Gulf wars, 9/11 and the Asian economic problems in the late 1990s and the fact that sales of commercial civilian aircraft remain buoyant.
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