Strike hits Frankfurt as Edmonton forges ahead
14 / 04 / 2015
Cargo volume at Germany’s Frankfurt airport was hit by the ongoing Lufthansa pilots’ dispute, falling 6.1 per cent to 189,546 tonnes in March 2015.
Airport owners Fraport Group said that flight cancellations led to reductions in belly capacity in the important intercontinental segment.
For the first quarter of the year (January-March), cargo traffic slipped two per cent to 511,355 tonnes.
The dispute had little effect on Frankfurt’s passenger traffic, which rose 2.5 per cent year on year to reach 4.6m.
Another leading German gateway, Munich Airport, said it too had been hit by the Lufthansa strike – but the first quarter 2015 total of 74,000 tonnes of airfreight represented a year-on-year increase of about eight per cent, said the airport authority.
There were no problems with strikes in at Edmonton International Airport in Canada, which saw its fifth consecutive year of cargo growth in 2014, with total volume growing by 25 per cent over five years.
In 2014 itself, air cargo volume grew by 3.9 per cent, thanks to Cargojet upgrading from a B757–200 freighter to a wide-body B767–300F, and a new DHL Express route to Edmonton.
The airport also expanded cargo apron seven to accommodate two additional large aircraft, part of an ongoing C$30m investment in new cargo areas and taxiways in 2014.
