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WITH A BOOM in budget flights and the slow turnaround in Europe’s financial fortunes, more and more people are taking to the skies.
This week the EU’s official stats office, Eurostat, released air passenger figures for 2014 that showed a jump in the number of travellers flying within every member state.
A total of 879.4 million passengers travelled by air in the EU last year and Ireland accounted for 26.3 million out of the total, up 6.9% compared to 2013.
The data also showed the top-nine airports in the bloc accounted for more than half of all passenger trips.
Dublin was only the 18th busiest airport on the list with 21.7 million passengers, although it did have the fourth-fastest growth among the top 20 hubs.
10. Barcelona-El Prat Airport
Barcelona’s El-Prat Airport is the second-busiest airport for funnelling passengers into Spain. Last year 37.4 million people used the airport, which also acts as the main base for low-cost carrier Vueling.
9. Gatwick Airport, London
Gatwick Airport is the second-busiest flight hub in the UK with passenger traffic growing an impressive 7.5% last year to 38.1 million. It is also the world’s busiest single-runway airport, although it has been pushing to build a second landing strip to boost capacity.
8. Fiumicino-Leonardo da Vinci International Airport, Rome
Rome’s main airport currently has four runways in operation and it is the hub for Italian flag carrier Alitalia. Last year it was Italy’s busiest hub with 38.3 million passengers, 6.5% up on the previous year.
7. Munich Airport
Munich Airport was built in 1992 and earlier this year became the first European airport to be given five-star status from UK consultancy Skytrax, joining four Asian flight hubs. Last year some 39.6 million passengers used the airport.
6. Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport
First opened in 1928, Madrid’s main airport is the busiest in Spain. Last year it processed 41.5 million passengers, although traffic has dropped since 2008 with the opening of a high-speed rail line connecting the national capital and Barcelona.
5. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol
Schiphol Airport is the main hub for airline KLM and last year it processed just under 55 million passengers, including the most from within the EU of any airport. It’s a far cry from when it was commissioned in 1916 as a military airbase.
4. Istanbul Atatürk Airport
The main airport in Turkey’s largest city is the only non-EU flight hub to be among the top-10 busiest in Europe. The airport, on the European side of Istanbul, is also easily the fastest-growing on the list, adding 11% to its traffic last year on the way to recording nearly 57 million passengers.
3. Frankfurt Airport
Despite being located in only Germany’s fifth-largest city, Frankfurt Airport is the busiest in the country. It serves as the main hub for Lufthansa and boasts four runways. Last year it processed more cargo traffic than any other airport in Europe, as well as some 59.4 million passengers.
2. Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris
Paris’s primary airport is the main hub for Air France and the European base for the world’s busiest carrier, Delta Air Lines. Last year it handled 63.7 million passengers, more than half of whom came from outside the EU.
1. Heathrow Airport, London
With five terminals opened between 1961 and 2014, London’s Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in Europe and the third-busiest in the world last year. Almost 73.4 million passengers passed through the airport in 2014 and that figure could increase significantly with the planned addition of a third runway.
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Comments closed on everything today bar the most mundane.
@Daniel O’Neill: Oh,for peat’s sake
@Daniel O’Neill: they’ll probably delete this too
@Daniel O’Neill: And even when you do comment it will only allow the most vanilla of replies for fear of offending someone. The journal is all about its clicks but if this horse manure continues the people won’t comment for much longer and will just drift away from the site altogether.
@Gerry from the Block: nah.. It’s been like this for years.. People drift in and out but it always has some base.. Just a slow revolving door
Didn’t read the article, but as long as we harvest peat we are only kidding ourselves about sorting climate change.
@DERRY1973: climate change is the new stealth tax that keeps talking and at this stage is it is going to take the citizens of Ireland to the cleaners to no avail because the it’s population of the world is the problem and taxes don’t make any difference except to those in middle income because the are subsidised to have children and stay at home for a hand living
Keep it in the ground, both in and out of Ireland.
@Peadar Ó Rathaille: that’s how I’ll be voting at the next elections.
Absolutely zero joined up thinking here on Planet Ireland. Can’t burn the peat here, but can import it and also vast quantities of wood biomass from some cut out rainforest.
Growing medium is something cyclically harvested out of integrated constructed wetland systems, on every suitable small stream and river, primarily for the sequestration of carbon, phosphate, and nitrates, before all our waterways and near inshore zones are ruined by eutrophication. This is where the farming subsidies should be going.
The mega one for the central bogs though, is a couple of SMRs into each of the old peat power stations. Then the data centres. Then the waste heat of both to a massive complex of hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, all pesticide free. Then the fly factories, their larvae eating a large part of our one million tonnes of food waste a year, before being fed to the salmon and chicken, with the rest of the bog area re engineered for sequestration.
Remember though we are dealing with Bord na Mona whose understanding of climate action was to stop using peat, but instead import wood biomass from Queensland.
@Nicholas Grubb: you would think the green party would be all over this sort of achievable biodiversity.
Apparently not.
Should the mushroom industry not have been researching alternatives before now as the cessation of peat harvesting has been widely flagged for years now? It can’t have come as a surprise.
Lorry loads of milled peat been sent to ports in Belfast to go to the rest of the UK is just wrong and a shame to see. It should be banned and strictly enforced
Since when were local council planners, an bord pleanala, and the EPA, competent judges / authorities / consultants?
@Archie Lochus: since never!!
I didn’t read the article so I don’t know if it said that a lot of the peat we export goes to the UK and then we buy the exact same peat back. Utter nonsense
An informative article but gets a bit bogged down in detail at times…
The production of the food that we eat, the food that sustains us, is being impeded, disparaged, and heckled at every level by the ultra-green lobby, who appear to think that they should be in complete control of what we eat and how it’s produced. Would absolute dictatorship be a realistic description of this mindset?
Irish peat for the Irish people
There was me wondering why we’re importing peat at all since we export the stuff. Then I had a look at the table: Northern Ireland peat would be considered an import. Fair enough. Second on the list: the Netherlands. Further away than Great Britain. “Peat it says here on the import papers. Nothin to see here. Let her through”.
Exporting bog
have your say