German Air-Freight 2009: Historically the greatest plunge
18-Feb-2010 As reported by the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis), 1.70 million tons of air freight (–5.1% compared with the previous year) were loaded at German airports and 1.64 million tons (–7.1%) were unloaded.
Transhipments (the sum of loaded and unloaded goods) reached a level of 3.24 million tons (-6.1%).To avoid double-countings quantities of national air-traffic (0.1 million tons) are counted only once.
The loss for transhipments (-209 100 tons) exceeds by far the losses for 2001 (-92 800 tons) and 1998 (-72 000 tons), the only reference periods since 1990 where decreases have been broken down.
Concerning the exchange of goods with European countries deliveries (0.52 million tons) did not reach the level of the previous year (-2.9%) whereas receipts (0.47 million tons) grew by 9.2%. Intercontinental traffic amounted as well for loadings as for unloadings to 1.08 tonnes of goods, loadings went down by 12.8% and unloadings by 6.0%.
On a quarterly basis the greatest losses were registered at the beginning of the year: Whereas the first and the second quarter of 2009 showed decreases of 14.8 and 16.5% for transhipments the results of the third one went down only by 4.7%. The figure of the final quarter 2009 exceeded the result of the corresponding period of the preceding year by 12.3%.