Financing of airports120 Introduction

Airports have traditionally been relatively profitable, especially those with an annual passenger throughput exceeding 1 million, and generally able to cover their operating costs (as was discussed in section 1.5). This has been true regardless of the fact that the majority were owned by national or local governments and, at least until more recently, run as public utilities. The implication of this for financing new investments is that, for many airports, a large proportion of funds used to finance capital investment can be generated from internally generated cash flow.