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Frankfurt Hahn: Profitable no-frills concept
By Sebastian Steinke
“The main thing about 2006 is that we achieved our first positive operating result of Euro500,000,” says Jörg Schumacher, spokesman for the management of Frankfurt Hahn airport, during an interview with FLUG REVUE. “It was important to us to prove that we could make a profit through growth and that our business model works.” Between 2002 and 2006 the airport's income has trebled. Schumacher is also predicting that in 2009 the company will make an overall profit for the first time.
The concept of this airport which lies 120 kilometres to the west of Frankfurt is quite different from that of most of its German rivals. Constructed on the secluded hills of Hunsrück during the Cold War as a nuclear bomber base for the US Air Force, Hahn is neither a mega-hub nor a city airport, but part of a simple, functional infrastructure. The austerity of the practical buildings – in a number of places inside the terminal one finds oneself looking at bare metal and uncovered ceilings – is more akin to a builder's yard or an IKEA store.
Despite this, everything is here in Hahn: check-in counters and information desk, catering, shops, newspapers, seating, security checks, toilets for the disabled, visitors' terrace, parking spaces, rental cars, a large bus station, a hotel and even a “lounge”. What is missing are any passenger boarding bridges. In Hahn, the passengers walk directly over the apron to the waiting aircraft through fenced off alley-ways. “At other airports you also have to walk, but before you get to the gate,” Schumacher points out.
3.7 million passengers, most of them customers of Ryanair, passed through the airport in 2006, up 20 percent on the previous year. 38 percent of departing passengers come from the Rhine-Main area, and as many as 43 percent from Rhineland-Palatinate. By far the most important destination is London, ahead of Rome. 20 percent of all passengers at Hahn are business travellers. 32 percent of arriving business travellers are heading for Frankfurt am Main, and another 20 percent for each of Mainz and Wiesbaden.
The average amount spent by each passenger in the terminal, excluding car parking charges, is 50 cents. This year the airport is already expecting passenger volume to rise to 4.3 millions, a figure expected to rise in stages to an impressive 9.7 million by 2012. It is thus high time to be thinking about expansion. Since 1998, the three owners of Flughafen Frankfurt-Hahn GmbH, Fraport AG (65 percent) and the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and Hesse (17.5 percent each), have between them invested Euro135 million in expansion. A further Euro240 million is to be used up on building projects by 2010. Hahn is upgrading.
The next item on the agenda is for the full length of runaway 03/21, which has already been extended from 3,045 metres to 3,800 metres at a cost of Euro37 million, to enter into operation. The extra length is needed by heavy freight carriers especially, which are grateful for every metre of runway length at this unusually high airport 500 metres above sea level, especially during the hot summer months. Commissioning of the runway extension will enable Aeroflot Cargo to realise it is long harboured dream of replacing its present DC-10F's with the heavier MD-11F. From a strategic point of view, the new runway length means that the airport's catchment area for fully fuelled cargo aircraft will now reach to Russia, the Middle East, India and elsewhere in Asia.
“Up to now cargo has just been extra business here. But we can also serve as an overflow. Capacity in the Rhine-Main area is exhausted,” says Schumacher. He is particularly pleased at the speed with which the public hearings on the runway extension were concluded; it had even been done with the agreement of local conservationists. “The regional importance of the extension did not escape the notice of even the nature conservation associations, BUND and NABU. They knew that we were starting from nothing here. Besides, they have shown consideration for public opinion.”
The eleventh biggest German passenger airport and fourth largest German cargo airport has created precious jobs in the structurally weak region of Hunsrück. Today 3,111 people work at the airport, 333 of them directly employed by the airport operating company, compared with the meagre 800 civilians who worked at Hahn in the days when it was an American base. 112 companies, offering jobs ranging from waiter to captain, have settled in the vicinity of the airport.
Once the runway extension is complete, attention will turn to the aprons and terminals. Already this spring work is starting on converting the old arrivals hall into departure gates and the construction of a new arrivals hall capable of handling three to four extra flights at peak periods, making a total of 14 to 15 parallel flights. “We are building one shoebox after another,” says Schumacher cheerfully.
Smooth ground handling is especially important to the airport's key customer, Ryanair, which aims to have its jets back in the air with a new set of passengers and their baggage only 25 minutes after engine shutdown following the incoming flight. Construction of a new cargo hall with 6,000 square metres of floorspace is set to commence in May. And finally, four new ramp positions at the terminal and two extra cargo positions for wide-body jets are to be created in 2007. Meanwhile, federal highway 50, which leads to the airport, is to be expanded into four lanes.
In the long-term the airport is planning not only to build two new parallel runways but to move the passenger operation to a completely new terminal to the south-west of the present facilities. They are even hoping that Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail operator, might revive the railway track which used to run to the air base, reconnecting the airport with Mainz, albeit not before 2010. As part of the same concept, air cargo facilities and maintenance are to be relocated to the north-east of the airport site. The loudest resistance to the expansion of Hahn has come from Deutsche Lufthansa. It has complained formally to the EU in Brussels and is bringing a case before the regional court of Bad Kreuznach, arguing that Hahn is illegally subsidising Ryanair. In true fighting spirit, airport manager Schumacher's retort is that, “Lufthansa would pay the same published prices in Hahn as Ryanair. They are bringing a lawsuit against us because they have no answer to Ryanair.”
From page 54 of FLUG REVUE 6/2007
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