Europe’s ‘FLAP’ airports infrastructure investments: Frankfurt leads way in short term - part one

Europe's 'FLAP' airports - Frankfurt, London Heathrow, Amsterdam Schiphol and Paris Charles de Gaulle each have large scale infrastructure investment programmes (apart from CDG, where a new terminal project was abandoned five years ago), which collectively add up to some USD75 billion over the next decade, the majority of it at Heathrow.

They individually need to do that in order to protect their own position not only amongst their peers but from an ever growing cluster of challengers in the Gulf and West Asia that are better positioned geographically to facilitate global travel in what is rapidly becoming a New World Order in the industry.

As this report reveals, all of these European airports face continuing economic, regulatory and political challenges to their ambitions while the fourth, Paris, has already seen that ambition crushed by a government that is slavishly committed to the new religion of environmentalism, one that will continue also to have an impact on the others.

It is difficult to identify a winner out of all of this. If one had to be selected it would be Frankfurt Airport if only because it continued with its third terminal scheme throughout the COVID-19 pandemic so that it can open in less than six months from now and because the management clearly learned a lesson from the debacle that was the construction of Berlin Brandenburg Airport.

Fire protection measures there are under constant scrutiny. Time-served airport management folk will immediately grasp the significance of that statement.

This is part one of a two-part report.