Strong passenger growth of 7.5% at Brussels Airport in January

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Cargo volume down with departure of Ethiopian Cargo

Brussels Airport received almost 1.5 million passengers in January, which is a significant increase of 7.5% compared with January last year. On the other hand, the number of flight movements rose by less than 1%, which means that the passenger load factor was much higher than in January last year. Freight volume declined by 2.4% compared with January last year. The decrease can be attributed to the departure of Ethiopian Cargo, which did not obtain the necessary traffic rights for Belgium.

Passengers
In January, Brussels Airport welcomed 1,481,275 passengers, up 7.5% on January last year. The strong growth is explained on the one hand by the increasing number of passengers that depart from Brussels Airport (+7.2% compared with January 2015), and on the other by the even stronger increase in the number of passengers transferring at Brussels Airport to another flight (+11.9% compared with January 2015). This big increase in the number of transfer passengers confirms the strong role that Brussels Airport plays as a hub within the Star Alliance network.

Growth is recorded in most segments. Brussels Airlines in particular carried more passengers in comparison with the previous January, but the long-haul flights and lowcost companies also recorded higher passenger numbers.

Cargo
The cargo volume transported through Brussels Airport saw a drop in January this year of 2.4% compared with January 2015. This decline can be entirely attributed to the fullfreight segment (-11.5%), which is still recovering from the departure of Ethiopian Cargo after the carrier did not obtain the necessary traffic rights to enable it to continue its activities at Brussels Airport.

Belly cargo (cargo carried on board passenger aircraft) rose by 3.0% compared with the same period last year. Integrator cargo remained stable compared with January 2015.

Flight movements
The number of flights at Brussels Airport rose only slightly. In comparison with January 2015 there was only a 0.9% increase in flights. The biggest growth was shown in the number of cargo flights, while the number of passenger flights remained more or less the same. Airline companies are not only deploying bigger aircraft, they are also carrying more passengers per flight. The average number of passengers per flight has risen strongly, from 94 passengers in January 2015 to 100 in January this year.

Brussels Airport, 9 February 2016

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