London Heathrow retains top spot as Europe’s busiest airport
LONDON Heathrow was Europe’s busiest airport in 2010, handling 66m passengers, ahead of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle and Frankfurt’s Main airports, figures released by the European Union show.
This was in stark contrast with Stansted, London’s third biggest airport where traffic fell by seven per cent in 2010 – the second largest decline in passenger numbers among Europe’s top 30 airports after Dublin, which saw traffic fall by 10 per cent.
Kastrup in Copenhagen and Schwechat in Vienna enjoyed the biggest growth in passengers by nine and 8.7 per cent respectively.
Eurostat, the statistics office of the European Union, said nearly 777m passengers across its 27 member states took to the skies in 2010, with some 323m on European flights, 291m flying out of Europe and 163m on national flights.
Overall, growth in air passenger transport slowed to 5.1 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2010 and 3.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2011 compared with the previous year.