Airport runway capacity constraints will begin to hit European national economies severely by 2005, but there is no political will to face that fact, says Philippe Hamon, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe director general.
"I believe that we will have to face a logjam like 1989 before the political will to act re-emerges," said Hamon, speaking at the recent ACI Europe annual assembly in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The 2005 estimate for runway logjam comes from a Eurocontrol study conducted for the European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC). Hamon says that 30 European major airports are already capacity-constrained, however, and that these together processed some 70% of the one billion passengers and 13 million tonnes of freight that were handled by the continent's airports in 2000.
Source: Flight International
