Longer Haul Routes Perform The Strongest At BAA Airports

The BAA November Traffic Figures has shown that among the key markets, it was the longer haul routes that performed the strongest.

North Atlantic traffic was up by 5.9%, helped by a rise in UK and European originating traffic encouraged by the weaker dollar, while other long haul routes recorded a collective increase of 7%.

In contrast UK Domestic traffic was down 4.3% and European scheduled activity up by just 0.9%. European charter traffic was unchanged on a year ago.

BAA’s UK airports handled a total of 10.8 million passengers in November, an increase of 1.5% on the same month last year.


There were mixed results among individual airports. Heathrow continued its recent recovery from the events of late 2006 with a 2.4% increase, while Gatwick was up by 6.2%, taking it to a 12 month total of 35 million passengers for the first time. Southampton grew by 2%.

As a result of some winter schedule cutbacks by Ryanair and Air Berlin, Stansted’s traffic decreased 6.3% in November.

In Scotland Edinburgh's 4.4% increase, attributable mainly to additional European scheduled traffic, took it past the 9 million passenger milestone. However Glasgow’s traffic was down by 3.2% and Aberdeen by 2.3% lower, although this followed an exceptionally strong result (+17.4%) in November last year.

In total the number of air transport movements at BAA airports was down 1.2% in November, within which figure the Scottish airports were down by 4.1% and the London area by 0.1%. Cargo tonnage continued its recent recovery at Heathrow with a 6.4% rise in November but of the other airports handling significant amounts of freight only Edinburgh (+9.6%) shared in this growth. Across the Group as a whole cargo activity was up by 3.1%.

(GK/JM)