Airports in Dresden and Leipzig are awakening from corona rigidity

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Aeroflot is coming back to Dresden in winter

In addition, from September Moscow will be served by the Russian airline S7, the successor to the airline Sibir. Aeroflot also wants to report back to Dresden in winter, says Ahmelmann. In general, the CEO assumes “that we will get all our goals back”. There will be cuts in frequencies. In September there could be flights to Stuttgart again, only the return from Cologne-Bonn on Dresden’s departure board is still open.

Ahmelmann, who has been in the executive chair for almost four years, is still putting the brakes on euphoria. The starting level is low, a long breath is necessary. Dresden’s airport normally counts 270 weekly flights in July, currently there are 70. In the year before the crisis, both Saxon locations together had 4.2 million passengers, “this year we will probably only manage one million”.

Leipzig overtakes London in terms of freight

The former Air Berlin manager prefers to talk about air freight. For good reason: there, Leipzig with its DHL hub was able to grow by 21 percent to 766,000 tonnes in the half-year comparison to 2020 and the airport had the most flight movements in Europe at times – also because of many flights with medical goods and hygiene articles. 75 employees from Dresden temporarily helped to cope with the huge volume. Leipzig has overtaken London and now ranks fourth among Europe’s largest freight addresses. The increase in freight partially offset the slump in passenger numbers.

In the first wave of corona, operations at German airports collapsed by 98 percent in April, and traffic to and from Saxony was temporarily reduced to transporting sick people and harvest workers, freight and return flights. Things went downhill in 2021 as well. In the first six months, Leipzig and Dresden together counted just 95,000 travelers. In the already declining period of the previous year, Dresden alone still had 240,000 passengers.

No discussions about downsizing

The airport association ADV sees locations in their existence endangered. The pandemic is far from over, they say. “In the best case scenario, we will see the pre-crisis level again in 2023.” After the financial crisis in 2008, it took until 2015 before as many planes were on the road in Europe as before. According to ADV, German airports will have to cope with a loss of three billion euros this year and next, and a quarter of the 180,000 immediate jobs are threatened.

“We don’t have any discussions about downsizing,” says MFAG boss Ahmelmann proudly. The Group’s 1,400 employees, almost a third of them in Dresden, bought protection against dismissal until the end of 2021 with a two-year wage zero round. They were also denied the tax-free corona premium granted by the federal government.

28 million euros in corona aid for Saxony’s airports

The 15 largest German airports had received a financial injection of 400 million euros from the federal and state governments. They were reimbursed for the costs of keeping them open at the beginning of the pandemic: loss of income from airport fees, rents, parking, refueling, advertising. According to Ahmelmann, Leipzig and Dresden received a total of 28 million euros.

The taxpayers’ association, on the other hand, appealed to politicians not to decide on additional subsidies. “Instead, the aim must be to consolidate the airport landscape in Germany” and to close locations if necessary, they say. The debate was fueled by the election manifesto of the Greens. The party wants to abolish domestic flights by 2032. “That would hit us hard with the feeder flights to the hubs,” says Ahmelmann. “80 percent of Frankfurt fliers are transferring passengers.”

Expansion plans need acceptance in the surrounding area

Ahmelmann is expressly committed to Dresden Airport, although it will be remote-controlled by pilots from Leipzig from 2022 and already had fewer passengers before Corona than 25 years earlier with the old terminal. The airport has been running its own website for a long time; it is practically the third runway for MFAG.

The airport manager is confident. The main growth will bring logistics in Leipzig, he says. The investment program there in the amount of 500 million euros is adhered to. The renovated North Runway will go into operation on September 1st. “We don’t build on suspicion, but on behalf of our largest customer DHL, who needs more space,” he says.