September stumble for Frankfurt and Heathrow

Frankfurt and London Heathrow airports both saw cargo throughputs drop by more than four percent in September.
Frankfurt, the number one air cargo hub in Germany and Europe last year, saw September volumes fall 4.7% to 170,200 tonnes, due to “strong” declines in North America, Latin America and the Far East, with the Japanese market being the exception, said airport operator Fraport.
For the year to date, Frankfurt has registered a 2.6% decline in total air cargo volumes to just over 1.5m tonnes, which is due to the “continuing weak development of world trade”.  It is unclear what effect the two day Lufthansa pilots’ strike in September had on cargo volumes.
The relative strength of the Japanese market was to be expected, given the cargo joint venture in and out of Japan between Lufthansa Cargo and ANA Cargo.
Heathrow, Europe’s number four cargo hub in 2014, saw September volumes down 4.4% to 119,000 tonnes, while the total for the first nine months of this year is near static, at 1.1m tonnes.
A spokesman for the London airport said: “Cargo volumes at Heathrow, the UK’s biggest port by value, grew 1.4% over the past 12 months, with increases to notable emerging markets including 36% to Mexico, 25% to Turkey, 13% to Brazil and 5% to India.”
Paris CDG and Amsterdam Schiphol airports, respectively second and third for European cargo volumes last year, have yet to report their September statistics.
But latest available data, for the eight months to August, shows that Paris’ cargo volumes were down 4.1%, as was Schiphol’s, but by a smaller amount, at 1.8%.
By comparison, Belgian hub Brussels, the ninth largest European cargo airport by volume in 2014, saw September’s airfreight traffic rise by 1.6%.
Germany’s Munich Airport, the 15th largest European freight hub by volumes last year, said that between January to September 2015 its cargo turnover totalled around 236,000 tonnes. This represents a 10% gain over like period 2014.
Both Brussels and Munich reported that main deck freighter tonnages had outpaced passenger bellyhold volumes.