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BAA’s UK airports handled 11.8 million passengers in April, a drop of 3% on April 2007. BAA attributed much of this decrease to the fact that Easter fell in March this year. When March and April figures are combined, negating the Easter effect, the overall result was a drop of 0.9%.

A significant factor in the April result were nearly 500 flight cancellations, of which 350 were at Heathrow and most of the rest at Gatwick. Roughly half of the cancellations resulted from the snowfall in the south on 6th April and the remainder were caused by massive operational difficulties after the opening of Terminal 5.

North Atlantic traffic was down 1% overall, but the new ‘Open Skies’ deal produced a 6% increase in this traffic at Heathrow. Other long haul traffic was up by 1.6%.

Of the individual airports only Southampton (+9.4%) and Aberdeen (+1.6%) recorded increases. Heathrow was down by 3.5% in April (-2.1% for March and April combined) while Gatwick and Stansted also lost ground in April, by 2.4% and 5.6% respectively. Glasgow (-0.6%) and Edinburgh (-0.2%) were also down on last year.

In total the number of air transport movements at BAA airports increased by 0.8% in April and cargo tonnage rose by 7.7% overall.

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