Budapest became an important target of air cargo

According to turizmusonline.hu, the air cargo of the Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport has increased by 11.3% since the beginning of the year. This growth mainly consisted of the traffic of the so-called cargo airlines, but the traffic of the belly cargo, which is transported in the planes’ cargo compartment, also showed a great growth.

Despite the current issues regarding the growing of the cargo industry in Europe, the traffic of the Budapest Airport dynamically increased. While a 2.7% increase was registered in the continent, the Hungarian traffic could experience an 11.3% growth in May. Within a single month 6770 tonne of cargo was checked at Liszt Ferenc Airport.

Furthermore, it is noted that, aside Europe, the cargo in America and Africa also decreased. Some explicit data about the May traffic of the world’s big airports are mentioned, too: Hong Kong had to face a drop by 1.1%, the decrease in Frankfurt was of 1.7%, whereas the information about Beijing showed a fall of 5.1%.

So, it might be surprising that Budapest could manage to succeed, a contributing factor definitely was the renewal of the flights of Qatar Cargo in March. The Airbus A 330F plane is capable of transporting goods of 60 tonne from the Hungarian capital to Doha, or anywhere in the world, through the network of Qatar Airways.

Moreover, cargo airlines, which have been operating in Budapest for a while now, including the Cargolux of Luxembourg and the Turkish Cargo, keep on working well. Also, according to József Kossuth, director of cargo development at the Budapest Airport, the long-term airlines transporting passengers, such as the Beijing flight of Air China and the Toronto flight of Air Canada Rouge, played a significant part in increasing the traffic.

Besides, Kossuth mentioned that the efficiency of the Hungarian economy can be seen easily, because the cargo compartments of the Air China flights to Beijing were almost always completely sold out, meaning the transportation of 10-12 tonnes of goods. Therefore, the expectations say that Budapest is highly likely to become the cargo centre of Eastern Europe in a short time.

And the traffic forecasts show that, as part of the BUD 2020 development programme of 50 billion HUF, the Budapest Airport has already begun the development of a new warehouse for a great European air parcel company, next to Terminal 1.

The constructions are on and the full sum of the investment might end up being about 3 billion HUF. Aside the aforementioned project, the Airport is preparing for the construction of Cargo City, a base for air cargo, at the area of Terminal 2, close to Vecsés. Moreover, at that area a storage and office capacity for checking 200,000 tonnes cargo per year will be created in the next few years.

Photo: MTI

Copy editor: bm

Source: turizmusonline.hu