Frankfurt Airport (FRA), Europe’s number one cargo hub by volumes, saw its 2015 full year airfreight and airmail throughput fall by 2.3% to around 2.1m tonnes.
FRA said that the decline was “attributable mainly to weakening global trade and economic difficulties in some emerging markets”.
By contrast, the German airport’s passenger traffic exceeded the 60m figure within a calendar year for the first time, notching a total of 61m passengers and a 2.5% jump year-on-year.
Said FRA of the passenger surge: “This increase would have been even greater without the impact of strikes by Lufthansa pilots and cabin crews. Adjusting for all extraordinary fight cancellations (including weather-related cancellations), passenger numbers would even have risen by 3.8%.”
The German hub’s cargo volumes in December also recorded a slight fall, down by 0.5% to 175,296 tonnes versus the same month in 2014.
One of the contributory factors to the annual decline was national carrier Lufthansa Cargo, based at Frankfurt, which carried 1.6m tonnes of freight and mail last year, a 2.4% decline on 2014 levels.
Of Europe’s other top cargo hubs, number three airport Schiphol has indicated a 0.9% decline to approximately 1.6m tonnes during 2015, while Paris at number two has still to issue its full year results, although for the first ten months its volumes were down 1.1% at 1.7m tonnes.
London-Heathrow, the region’s fourth largest cargo hub, reported total volumes of 1.5m tonnes in 2015, a 0.2% decline compared with a year earlier.
Brussels airport saw 2015 full year freight volumes grow 7.8% to just over 489,000 tonnes, helped by the arrival of four new cargo carriers in the full freighter segment and the development of express services at the Belgian gateway.
