In 2010, London/Heathrow remained the EU’s busiest passenger airport, with 66 million passengers handled, down by 0.2% compared with 2009. Paris/Charles de Gaulle (58 mn, +0.5%) and Frankfurt/Main (53 mn, +4.1%) were the second and third busiest airports, followed by Madrid/Barajas (50 mn, +3.9%) and Amsterdam/Schiphol (45 mn, +3.7%).

Nine of the top 30 airports registered decreases in the number of passengers handled in 2010, with Dublin (-10.1%) showing the largest fall, followed by London/Stansted (-7.0%), Manchester and Athinai (both -5.2%). The largest increases were observed in København/Kastrup (+9.1%), Wien/Schwechat (+8.7%), Milano/Malpensa (+7.9%) and Roma/Fiumicino (+7.6%).

London/Heathrow (39 mn) handled the most extra-EU passengers, Amsterdam/Schiphol (25 mn) the most intra-EU passengers and Madrid/Barajas (19 mn) the most national passengers.

These figures are published in a report from Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, on air transport in the EU27 in 2010. This report also looks in detail at national, intra-EU and extra-EU air transport of passengers and freight, as well as the most important airport pairs within the EU27.

Gradual slow down of the growth in the number of air passengers

In 2010, nearly 777 million passengers were transported by air in the EU27, split into 323 million passengers on intra-EU flights, 291 million on extra-EU flights and 163 million on national flights. Quarterly data show a decrease in air passenger transport in the second quarter of 2010 (-1.3% compared with the second quarter of 2009), due to the Icelandic volcanic eruption. Growth returned in the third quarter of 2010 with passenger number up by 5.8% compared with corresponding period of the previous year. Since then however, there has been a gradual slow down of the growth, air passenger transport increasing by 5.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010 and by 3.5% in the first quarter of 2011.