Forecast shows aviation patterns changing across Europe
30.03.06
The latest forecast issued by Eurocontrol has highlighted the need for policy-makers to plan for substantial increases in the numbers of flights across Europe as well as changes to the pattern of these flights over the next 7 years.
Medium-term forecasts look at growth across Europe over the next 7 years. The current forecast concludes that there will be over 11.4 million flights per year in Europe by 2012, which is 26% more than 2005.
This represents an increase of 3.3% each year. The study finds that growth will not be uniform across europe, with countries such as Romania, Ukraine and Armenia seeing a rise of 50% within the seven year period. Others countries such as Switzerland and Norway have growth predictions of 20%.
Growth in traffic will have an impact on airports across the Europe. Madrid Barajas airport is set to become the third busiest airport in Europe by the end of 2012, surpassing Heathrow and Schiphol airports in terms of IFR flights. Charles de Gaulle and Main in Frankfurt remain first and second. Ataturk airport, Istanbul is also scheduled to grow rapidly over the coming years.
The combination of this growth and the increasing strength of growth trends in Turkey, particularly tourism, means that around 2010, Istanbul will join the limited number of airports where capacity will restrict growth. With the opening of the new runway in Frankfurt in 2009-2010, the most constrained airports will be Heathrow, Gatwick and Istanbul.
High-speed train development is also predicted to have an impact on air traffic, reducing growth by about 80,000 flights or 1% in total over the 7 year period of the forecast. Spain and Italy will see the largest reductions in numbers of flights due to high speed trains, 4% and 2% respectively with France likely to have a reduction of 1 percent
In Spain, the impact and reduction in flights will mainly be felt on the domestic Madrid-Barcelona route. Currently this route is the busiest city pair in terms of air traffic with an average of 127 flights between the two cities daily.
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