A HUGE growth in Irish, transatlantic and scheduled European flights gave southeast airports major passenger increases last year.
Gatwick handled 30.4m customers during 1999, a 4.7% rise on 1998; Heathrow climbed to 62m, up 2.7%; the biggest increase was at Stansted with 37.9% extra passengers at 9.4m.
Overall, BAA’s seven UK airports reported 116.9m customers last year, an improvement on the 110.6m in 1998. However, last month’s BAA traffic was down 0.4% on December 1998 at 7.9m. This was due to a larger than normal slow down around the holiday period of passengers staying at home for millennium celebrations.