Airports Council International (ACI), the European airport trade body, has released statistics showing that freight traffic across its European airport members increased by 2.1% in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period of last year.
All of that growth was moved across airports based in EU countries; amongst non-EU nation airports, cargo traffic actually declined year on year by 0.2%.
The figures suggested that the overall impact of the terrorist attack on Brussels in late on traffic across the continent as a whole wasn’t huge, despite the disruption to flights at the Belgian gateway.
In fact, aircraft movements rose by 4.0% year on year over the quarter, reflecting the additional capacity available in the European market.
While the quarterly results are disappointing, those for March are worse. Cargo traffic amongst European airports during March was down by 1.8% year on year.
ACI represents nearly 500 airports across 45 European countries. In 2014, these gateways handled approximately 18.4 million tonnes of freight.
