BAA passengers up 0.7% in December; 1.6% in 2007<
09.01.08
BAA's seven UK airports - including Gatwick, Heathrow and Stansted - handled almost 150 million passengers last year - a 1.6% increase on 2006. A total of 149,953,800 passed through the airports in 2007, with Heathrow handling 67.8 million 0.8% up on the previous year.
Of the seven airports, only Glasgow (1.1% down at 8.72 million) experienced a drop in passenger numbers last year compared with 2006. Operations at the airport were briefly affected by last summer's terror attack, although the numbers would probably have been flat had the attack not happened.
At Gatwick passengers were up by 3.2% to 35.16 million, while at Stansted increased 0.3% to nearly 23.76 million. Southampton Airport passenger numbers increased 2.8% to 1.96 million, while Edinburgh rose 5.0% to nearly 9.04 million and Aberdeen was up 7.9% at 3.43 million.
In December the seven airports handled 10.9 million passengers, a 0.7% increase on 2006. Despite fog at Heathrow, the total there last month reached 5.37 million - a 3.2% rise on the December 2006 figure for the west London airport, as it suffered even worse fog at Christmas 2006.
Gatwick was up by 2.7% in December and Southampton by 2.6%. Stansted traffic decreased by 8.6% in December due to some cutbacks in the winter schedule of both Ryanair and Air Berlin. Glasgow and Aberdeen also experienced falling passenger numbers, down 5.0% and 2.2% respectively. Edinburgh Airport's traffic was 3.6% higher, further widening the gap over Glasgow as it consolidates its place at Scotland's busiest airport.
Air transport movements across the Group were 0.2% down compared to last December, with Stansted (-8.1%) and Glasgow (-8.2%) recording the biggest drops. Heathrow and Gatwick posted increases of 3.1% and 3.2% respectively and, for the year as a whole, movements were up 0.9% across the group to 1.3 million.
Key market results in the month included a 6.3% increase in North Atlantic traffic and a 2.5% gain in traffic on other long haul routes. European scheduled traffic was unchanged on last year, while European charter passengers were down by 1.7%. Although Domestic traffic fell by 3.5%, this represented an improvement on the trend of recent months as a result of the comparison with the more severely disrupted operations in December 2006.
Cargo tonnage was up by 16.8% at Heathrow in December following a month of disruption in December 2006, with the Group recording a gain of 10.9%. Over the year as a whole cargo tonnage fell by 1.8% to 1.7 million tonnes.
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