Hurricane Niklas raging through northern Europe on March 31 and the four-day Lufthansa pilot strike were blamed for reducing airfreight throughput at most of the Fraport Group’s airports, according to traffic figures from the airport management company. Strike-related flight cancellations affected cargo because of reductions in belly capacity in the intercontinental traffic frequencies, Fraport said.
Cargo volume, including both airfreight and airmail, at Fraport’s largest cargo hub, Frankfurt Airport (FRA), dropped 6.1 percent, compared to the same period last year, to 189,546 metric tonnes for the month of March. Year-to-date, FRA had a throughput of 511,355 tonnes of freight, a drop of 2 percent, year over year.
The only airport in the group that saw an increase in Q1 2015 was Lima, Peru, up 6.4 percent, handling 64,710 metric tonnes. Ljubljana, Slovenia, dropped 3 percent, with a throughput of 2,296 metric tonnes; Burgas, Bulgaria, was down 17.6 percent, processing only 1,358 tonnes of cargo; and Varna, Bulgaria, had only 18 tonnes move through, down 100 percent year-over-year.
On a happier note, passenger traffic was up 2.5 percent, year-over-year, for the group.
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