Status: 09.09.2019 3:25 p.m.
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NDR info
by Marvin Milatz and Marc-Oliver Rehrmann
Should domestic flights cease in the future to promote climate protection? This question has been asked again and again in the past weeks. NDR.de has therefore researched how many domestic and short-haul flights the airlines offer at Hamburg Airport – the largest airport in the north. The analysis of almost 40,000 flight connections from mid-April to late August shows that every third passenger flight is a domestic flight. If you look at the connections with a maximum distance of 500 kilometers, every fourth flight from Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel is included. It also includes destinations abroad such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Brussels.
The two most common destinations are in Germany
The following applies to Hamburg Airport: The two most popular routes are domestic flights – to Frankfurt am Main and Munich, the two most important German hubs for international air traffic. Every second passenger from the Hanseatic city travels abroad on the route to Frankfurt, 27 percent of the passengers are transfer passengers to Munich. The Bavarian capital is served most frequently from Hamburg: in 2018, 1,750,000 passengers used this route, according to Hamburg Airport.
A total of nine German airports can be reached by plane from Hamburg. In addition to Frankfurt and Munich, these also include Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Cologne / Bonn, Mannheim, Nuremberg, Saarbrücken and Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. A total of 5.2 million passengers flew from Hamburg within Germany in 2018.
Domestic flights, especially on long routes
“Domestic German flights essentially only take place on longer routes, that is, where the travel time by train does not allow business travelers to make appointments in one day,” reports the Federal Association of the German Aviation Industry (BDL). This is also borne out by the figures: According to the BDL, 96 percent of domestic German air travel is longer than 400 kilometers.
No more scheduled flights from Berlin to Nuremberg
In general, wherever the train is an attractive alternative, travelers are more likely to do without a domestic flight. The following applies: the travel time by train must not last much longer than three hours. This is shown by the latest example of the loss of a domestic connection: on the Nuremberg – Berlin route. After the expansion of the ICE route between Berlin and Munich, Nuremberg can now be reached from the capital in 3:15 hours by ICE. As a result, many travelers switched to the train. As a result, the business was no longer profitable and the connection was removed from the flight schedule in June 2019. “On the Berlin-Nuremberg route it was possible to stop domestic traffic because the journey there takes around three hours,” said BDL spokesman Ivo Rzegotta in an interview with NDR.de.
The alternative train does not work to the same extent on the Berlin – Munich route. “The number of air passengers there has recently increased by as much as two percent,” says Rzegotta. “With more than four hours, the train journey between Berlin and Munich is still too long for many passengers.”
Is Düsseldorf a candidate for a string?
But what about Hamburg Airport? Are there currently domestic flights that would be unnecessary there? In the best case scenario, it takes 6:15 hours to travel from Hamburg to Munich by ICE – from central station to central station. The pure flight time is only about 75 minutes. For example, the train is not an attractive alternative for many destinations in southern Germany – especially for business people who can save themselves a hotel night when booking a flight. But what about flights to the Rhineland? In 2018, 526,000 passengers flew on the route to Düsseldorf and 478,000 to Cologne / Bonn.
The CO2 balance speaks for the railway
Düsseldorf can be reached by train in just over three and a half hours, Cologne in four hours. If you include the journey to the airport and the waiting time before boarding, an air traveler is not necessarily faster in Düsseldorf. In addition, the carbon dioxide balance shows a clear picture: by train, a traveler from Hamburg to Düsseldorf has an output of 12 kilograms, by plane it is around 126 kilograms. The values are given by Online CO2 calculator EcoPassenger of the Heidelberg Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Assuming that all air travelers on the Hamburg-Düsseldorf route would switch to the train, around 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions could be avoided. According to the Federal Environment Agency, this corresponds to the CO2 emissions caused by around 6,000 people in Germany each year.
Airport would have to accept losses
For Hamburg Airport, the loss of one or more short-haul connections would be painful from an economic point of view. “Such a dropout affects numerous participants. Above all, it has an impact on the passengers and thus the users of the flight connections,” says airport spokeswoman Katja Bromm when asked by NDR.de. “On the other hand, it also affects tourism in Hamburg and the airport itself, for example, which would have to accept losses.”
Two short-haul connections have already been dropped at Hamburg Airport: There have been no scheduled flights to Berlin since 2011 after the ICE route between the Hanseatic city and the capital has been modernized. The Hamburg-Leipzig connection has been a thing of the past since 2006.
