Status: 12.02.2021 12:22 p.m.
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The federal government is planning extensive new state aid for German airports. However, only regional airports with higher passenger numbers are to receive direct support.
The pandemic hit German airports hard – now the federal government has agreed on details of an aid package for the industry. Only larger airports and regional airports are to receive direct aid.
As Minister of Transport Andreas Scheuer announced, the 15 most important airports in Germany are to be supported by the state with a total of more than 600 million euros. According to the German Press Agency, the airports in Bremen, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Leipzig, Münster / Osnabrück, Nuremberg, Saarbrücken and Stuttgart will receive one-off grants. They are to be reimbursed for costs that they incurred at the beginning of the pandemic in order to stay open. The federal government wants to provide 200 million euros for this. The federal government itself is not involved in these locations.
The support package also includes aid of more than 400 million euros for the three airports Berlin-Brandenburg, Cologne / Bonn and Munich, in which the federal government is involved. Furthermore, the federally owned Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH will receive equity support of 300 million euros in the current year.
Countries must participate in the aid
In order for the funds to flow, the respective federal states must also promise a grant of the same amount. In addition, no dividends or bonuses may be paid to managing directors and board members for the past year. This should affect, for example, the listed Fraport AG, the operator of the largest German airport in Frankfurt.
For small airports only waiver of fees
For the even smaller regional airports, however, there should be no direct financial aid. They should only be relieved of charges for air navigation services that they cannot always pass on to the airlines. In the 2021 budget, 20 million euros have been earmarked for this support measure.
The fact that the smaller regional airports are no longer receiving help is likely to be related to their lack of profitability even before the outbreak of the pandemic. Kassel-Calden Airport is an extreme example. Here had that ARD–Magazin Plus minus reports that from January to October last year just 27,000 passengers were carried. While the taxpayer in Calden had raised a good 130 euros per passenger in 2018, it was already 650 euros in 2020. The airport’s crisis had recently come to a head.
Many regional airports can hardly be operated profitably because they are very close to one another. From Kassel-Calden, for example, Paderborn Airport is less than an hour’s drive away – although it had fewer than 100,000 passengers last year.
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