LONDON – Liege Airport today announced that it has seen a record strong growth amid increasing uncertainty over the airline industry with fresh travel restrictions.
The airport said that the total Freight traffic has surpassed 1.4 million tonnes cargo movement in contrast to that of 1.1 million tonnes in 2020, with a spike of 26%.
As more pandemic relief, pharmaceutical flights, and humanitarian flights are increasing its traffic to Liege, the airport has since managed to lead the charts with growing numbers and strong growth.
CEO of Liege Airport, Laurent Jossart expressed that “The global disruption of supply chains, and the lack of air transport capacity in the holds of passengers aircraft, are the trends that emerged in 2020 and that have also spurred our growth in 2021. Humanitarian equipment, the pharmaceuticals sector and healthcare (masks, vaccines, medicines) are the main market segments.”
Mr. Jossart further added that “Thanks to our multimodal approach, Liege Airport, and the logistics sector had anticipated being at the center of European cross-border trade.”
“The growth in the amount of rail freight coming into the Liege Logistics Terminal has been outstanding. Between them, the Liege Rail Terminals, which have connections to China, handled 16,103 containers in 2021, an increase of almost 70% over the numbers for 2020.”
“That’s 172,893 tonnes, both for import and export (+66%), with significant growth in the number of full containers for export.”
Passenger traffic at Liege has also shown some signs of recovery, as the airport handled 76,493 passengers in 2021, as compared to 44,487 in 2020, with rising of 72%, which is still below pre-pandemic levels when the airport witnessed a total of 170,737 passenger movement.
Along with the cargo and passenger, the airport has also witnessed significant aircraft traffic with 45,699 aircraft movements in 2021 compared to 40,301 aircraft movements in 2020, a rise of 13.4%).
Exclusive cargo freighters movement from Liege has reached 38,393 aircraft in 2021, as compared to that of 2020 when the movement was recorded at 34,310, a spike of 12%.
In all, this is positive news for the airport and will no doubt continue well into 2022.
