March figures on airport traffic in Europe have turned up some big surprises for small airports; some have leapt from nowhere into the continent’s top ten.
A quick look at the picture above, taken at East Midlands Airport in Leicestershire gives a hint to the reason for the abrupt shift from barely-13th-in-the-UK to Number 10 in Europe. Like Leipzig in Germany, which jumped from nowhere to Number 3, EMA has a much greater ratio of freight flights to passengers, and while the passenger traffic has dropped to almost nowhere, the freight business has kept up.
Most of the other top ten are the usual suspects: Frankfurt, Heathrow, Paris CDG, Cologne/Bonn, Amsterdam, followed by Oslo and Bergen. Istanbul took ninth, with EMA just behind it. Of course, even with the freight business, the airport’s 99 flights a day are just under half its normal volume.
