Financiarul

Traffic on Baneasa Airport in Bucharest advanced more than 4-fold in the past four years, but its infrastructure remained almost at the same level, namely a single runway for the daily flights, Ziarul financar daily reports.

Whereas in 2005 the number of passengers choosing Baneasa Airport did not exceed 400,000, last year the traffic was up to 1.7 million passengers and in the first five months of the year to over 750,000 passengers.

“We saw an almost 22 percent rise in the number of passengers in the first five months from the similar period last year. Each day there are almost 100 take offs and landings”, stated Marius Girdea, operations manager of Aurel Vlaicu (Baneasa) Airport, quoted by the newspaper.

The representative of Baneasa Airport maintained that the existence of a single runway allows at the most 12-14 landings or take offs per hour.

“We have yet to attain this maximum of 14 landings per hour, but Blue Air Co. came with the proposal to develop the airport by the construction of a new departures terminal”, said Girdea.

To this end, Blue Air Co. has signed a leasing contract on a 25 year period for the construction of a new departures terminal, the investment going to amount to some 10 million euros.

Whereas Baneasa Airport further shows increasing passenger numbers, the largest airport countrywide, Henri Coanda from the Capital, reported a drop by 15 percent in the traffic in the first five months, to 1.6 million passengers, according to data offered by airport representatives.

Different data reported by the two airports are also completed by the results announced so far by the air operators.

As such, whereas Blue Air and Wizz Air, the top two low-cost players, recorded a 2-figure growth in the number of passengers, Tarom, the largest air company in Romania, reported a 13.9 percent decline in the number of passengers in the first 5 months of the year, according to data released by the Association of European Airlines (AEA).

This low-cost operators’ advance is also obvious from the last year figures, according to which Blue Air, Wizz Air, MyAir, Sky Europe, Germanwings, easyJet or Ryanair transported in 2008 to and from Romania some 2.5 million passengers, whereas the regular lines operators reported last year a business in excess of 6 million euros on the domestic market, a much smaller difference compared to the previous years.

At present, 17 airports operate in Romania, with a traffic of 9.1 million passengers last year, according to the Association of Airports data.

Airports in Bucharest (Otopeni and Baneasa) and those in Timisoara, Cluj and Iasi, the largest five airports in the country, register a traffic of almost 8.6 million passengers annually.