ABSTRACT
Figure 16.1 shows annual RPKs on the North Atlantic route since 2000. The impact of 9/11 in 2001 and SARS and the Iraq War in 2003 can clearly be observed with the growth not returning until 2004. Up until mid-2008, there was a steady increase in traffic but then traffic began to fall and evidence from the Association of European Airlines (AEA) (albeit that this just covers European carriers) showed a decline of 6.9 per cent for the first eight months of 2009 compared to the previous year (AEA, 2009). Premium traffic on the North Atlantic, which globally accounts for a fifth of this type of demand and close to a third of all revenues, was particularly depressed during this period and showed a decline of 15 per cent (IATA, 2009b). Figure 16.2 shows that traffic to and from the UK accounts for around a third of the total US traffic, followed by Germany with a market of about half this size. No other European country has a market share of greater than around 10 per cent. At most European airports transatlantic passengers make up less than 10 per cent of the total passenger traffic (Table 16.1). The exceptions are the major airports of London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt and Amsterdam. This is partly as a result of the three major European carriers (BA, Air France-KLM, Lufthansa) consolidating their services at their major hubs whilst the other European carriers tend to concentrate more on serving niche city-pairs. An unusual airport is Shannon airport in Ireland where North Atlantic
traffic has traditionally accounted for a significant share of the total traffic because regulatory requirements up until 2008 made it obligatory for carriers to make a stopover at this airport. Since the average aircraft size for transatlantic services tends to be larger than that used for the higher volume of short-haul flights (albeit that the average size of aircraft across the Atlantic has been decreasing) these flights account for a smaller proportion of total aircraft movements, for example Frankfurt (8 per cent), Amsterdam (6 per cent), Zurich (5 per cent) and Athens (3 per cent) and Munich and Madrid (2 per cent). On the other side of the Atlantic, New York is by far the largest gateway with transatlantic traffic accounting for 28 per cent of passengers and 16 per cent of movements at JFK airport and 20 per cent of passengers and 10 per cent of movements at Newark. JFK, however, has lost considerable market share over the years when at one time it handled over half of all the US-European traffic. Likewise the other key gateways used to be the major cities on the East and West Coast such as Boston, Los Angeles and Miami but these have lost out somewhat to the hub airports near the East Coast such as Atlanta, Washington Dulles and Philadelphia. After JFK and Newark, the most important airports for transatlantic traffic are Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta, Washington Dulles, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami and San Francisco. All the major European airlines serve all these ten destinations whilst the smaller ones serve New York and usually a couple of others which will depend on factors such as ethnic links, geographic position or alliance membership (Dennis, 2007). The Canadian market is much smaller with the most significant airport being Toronto followed by Montreal. Table 16.2 shows the most important routes in 2007. The majority of these were served by Heathrow but there were also two routes from Paris.
