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Europe
Amsterdam Schiphol Wants to Set the Record Straight on Flight Cuts
Edward Russell
October 30th, 2023 at 10:54 AM EDT
The entrance to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport
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Airlines are warily watching the situation at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport where a caretaker Dutch government is pushing through a dramatic cut in the number of flights. Airport officials are working hard to provide the industry with clarity on just what the cuts, which could still be reversed, mean as airlines plan their schedules for next summer.
“We’re trying to explain what’s going on, [and] provide perspective,” Schiphol Head of Aviation Partnerships Joery Strijtveen said at the Routes World conference in Istanbul earlier in October.
And Strijtveen was in the right place to set the record straight. Routes is the annual gathering of airports and airline network planners where they meet to talk about, you guessed it, routes. This allowed airport officials to sit down with many of their airline partners and explain the situation behind the public statements and capacity declaration by Schiphol slot coordinator, Airport Coordination Netherlands (ACNL).
The number of aircraft movements at Schiphol is set to be capped at 280,645 next summer season, which runs from the end of March through the end of October for airlines, according to ACNL. That represents a nearly 8% cut from the summer of 2019, part of an effort by the Dutch government to reduce noise pollution in the neighborhoods around the airport. The aim is to reduce movements to 460,000 annually from 500,000 before the pandemic.
But an 8% reduction may just be the beginning. The Dutch government has said it eventually wants to cut movements by 12%, or to 440,000 annually.
Put another way, Schiphol would have fewer annual flights than the physically smaller London Heathrow. Heathrow, which has two runways to Schiphol’s six (only five are capable of handling large passenger aircraft), handled nearly 476,000 aircraft movements in 2019. The difference is that London is a much larger and more lucrative market for airlines than Amsterdam, which has made its name as one of the leading connecting hubs in Europe.
The most affected is KLM, which will operate 55% of flights at Schiphol this year, according to Cirium Diio schedule data. EasyJet is the second largest at the airport with an 8% share of flights followed by Transavia, the budget subsidiary of Air France-KLM, with a 7% share.
