The week’s main network impact was on Tuesday 20 February, when a ground handling strike affecting Lufthansa saw the airline cancel around 80% of its total schedules.
This pushed down operations at Lufthansa, Europe’s 4th busiest airline, by 14% week-on-week, resulting in 954 average daily flights.
Traffic at Lufthansa’s 2 main hubs was also down, with Frankfurt recording a 10% drop to 1,003 daily flights (and slipping to 6th place behind Madrid on 1,078), and Munich similarly dropping by 11% (744 daily flights & also down a place, dropping to 8th behind Barcelona on 833). At State level the impact was more diluted, with Europe’s third busiest State seeing a 4% traffic easing (3,828 daily flights).
Otherwise, most values across European airlines, airports and States were similar compared to Week 7.
Among Europe’s busiest airports, there was one other ranking change as Amsterdam Schiphol edged ahead of London Heathrow into second place with 1,275 daily flights (+1%) and 1,265 daily flights (unchanged vs Week 7) respectively.
The highest week-on-week increase in the top 10 was recorded by 4th busiest airport Paris CDG, up 4% on 1,173 daily flights.
There were few changes among Europe’s busiest aircraft operators, with the top 3 of Ryanair Group, easyJet Group and Turkish Airlines all within 1% of Week 7 values (in the case of easyJet, after several weeks of significant ramping up of operations). Only the Air France Group stood out with a 5% increase (907 daily flights) in 4th place.
Intra-European flights were down 1% vs Week 7 on 18,877 daily flights, although flows with 6 of the 8 other regions actually increased week-on-week.
Within Europe, the top 7 flows were all internal, led by intra-Spain (1,156 daily flights), followed by intra-Türkiye (794) and intra-France (783). The highest intra-European international flow was between Spain and the UK (557), with Germany-Spain after that (381).
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