The British Airports Authority (BAA) has revealed the annual passenger numbers for its seven UK airports.

During 2007, the group's airports - London Heathrow, London Gatwick, London Stansted, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Southampton and Aberdeen - handled nearly 150 million passengers.

This was increase of 1.6% on the group's annual passenger figure for 2006.

Heathrow handled 67.8 million passengers. Gatwick handled 35.16 milllion and Stansted 23.76 million, while numbers at Southampton rose to 1.96 million. The figures for BAA's three Scottish airports were 9.04 million at Edinburgh, 8.2 million at Glasgow and 3.43 million at Aberdeen.

All airports in the BAA porfolio recorded growth in passenger numbers, with the sole exception of Glasgow where numbers declined by 1.1%. BAA said operations at Glasgow had been briefly affected by the attempted terrorist attack at Glasgow in June 2007.

BAA said that during the holiday season in December 2007, the group's airports handled 10.9 million passengers. Over 5 million of these were at Heathrow, despite delays caused by fog at the airport.

Aircraft Movements and Air Cargo

Reflecting the rise in passenger numbers, aircraft movements at the seven airports rose by 0.9% to 1.3 million. Individually, Heathrow and Gatwick were the best performers with increases in movements of 3.1% and 3.2% respectively.

Meanwhile, the amount of air cargo tonnage handled by BAA airports slightly declined during 2007 by 1.8% to 1.7 million tonnes.

Source - Airport International's Aviation Correspondent

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