BAA’s seven UK airports handle 10.7 million passengers in December 2005

BAA’s seven UK airports handled a total of 10.7 million passengers in December, an increase of 2% on December 2004. This took the calendar year total to 144.3 million, an increase of 3%.

There were mixed results among the key market segments. North Atlantic traffic was down by 1.7%, while other long haul routes recorded a collective gain of 7.4%. European scheduled traffic was up by 3.7%, but the smaller European charter market was 16.4% lower than in December 2004 as some of the charter airlines continued the trend of diversifying into scheduled flying.

Traffic on Irish routes, helped by new low-cost services, rose by 7.5%, while UK domestic routes saw a drop of 0.5%.

Among individual airports the fastest growing was Southampton, with an 18.6% increase in December. Elsewhere in the South East, Stansted grew by 4.8% and Gatwick by 2.5%. Heathrow was unchanged. In Scotland Aberdeen was 10.4% up on December 2004 and there were gains of 3.5% and 1.9% at Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively.

In total the number of air transport movements was up by 3% in December, a rise of 3.2% for the year, while cargo tonnage was down by 0.5% in December, unchanged over the year.

For the financial year to date, traffic at BAA’s seven UK airports is running 2.4% higher than in the same period of the previous year. BAA now expects the total for the full financial year to the end of March to be around 2.5%, rather than the approximately 3% estimated at the time of the company’s interim results on November 1.

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