It has more routes than Schiphol, better connections than
CDG and, unlike Heathrow, it actually works… Welcome to Frankfurt, says Lucy
Fitzgeorge-Parker.
As BA breathes a sigh of relief that the
second phase of its move to T5 has gone without a hitch, Frankfurt airport is
celebrating a rather different event. This summer marks the anniversary of the
start of the Berlin Airlift in 1948, when thousands of tonnes of food and
supplies left the American military base at Frankfurt en route to beat the
Soviet blockade of West Berlin.
Sixty years on, the US Air Force has left, but Frankfurt airport is still making the most of its strategic position between east and west. Robert Payne of airport operator Fraport says: “When Eastern Europe was opening up, we worked very hard to market Frankfurt and to bring in all the little airlines. Other airports call themselves the gateway to the east, but we have better connections.”
Frankfurt has also proved remarkably far-sighted when looking further afield. As the European hubs battle to attract business travellers, one of its major selling points is its unrivalled connections to the world’s fastest-growing markets. Payne says: “Asia is the market which makes people’s eyes pop open with dreams of development, and Frankfurt is already serving all the main gateways in China and India.”
Much of this growth is down to Lufthansa and Star Alliance, both of which have their headquarters at Frankfurt. As part of its ongoing eastward expansion, the German carrier is now focusing on secondary cities in Asia, and this summer has added two new Chinese destinations, Nanjing and Shenyang. Meanwhile, Star has widened its coverage this year with the addition of Air China and Turkish Airlines, and is due to welcome Egyptair in July. Payne says: “As alliances grew, we encouraged airlines to get together and we facilitated it. Frankfurt was the first airport in the world where Star partners could be clustered together in one terminal.”
(Fraport is building its own ties with the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. The operator has an eight-year management contract at Cairo airport and is involved in projects in Delhi and Shanghai, which will help strengthen those cities’ links with Frankfurt.)
Frankfurt’s excellent connectivity in the air is replicated on the ground. Not only is the airport located next to the Frankfurter Kreutz, the biggest autobahn interchange in Germany, it is also plugged into both the European high-speed rail network and the regional S-Bahn service via its two railway stations. “No other airport in Europe has so many rail links,” says Payne. “We have 170 intercity trains a day, including high-speed services to Amsterdam and Brussels, and lots of our airlines have a ‘rail and fly’ service. We’re not just an airport – we call ourselves an intermodal travel port.”
As every business traveller knows, however, there is more to making connections than “intermodality” – it is also about getting passengers onto flights, preferably with their luggage. Here, again, Frankfurt scores over its European rivals, with short connection times, good punctuality and highly efficient baggage-handling.
Jorg Hennemann, Lufthansa’s head of hub development and capacity management, says: “It is crucial for Frankfurt that we offer an exceptional transfer product, that we keep our promises with regard to safe connections, and that customers can rely on getting their bag back when they give it to Lufthansa.”
Figures aren’t compiled for individual airports, but in the first quarter of this year Lufthansa was responsible for 71,000 fewer delayed bags than BA despite carrying nearly four million more passengers, according to the Association of European Airlines. Payne puts this down to the fact that, unlike BAA, Fraport still does the vast majority (91 per cent) of the ground-handling at Frankfurt. “You can have the flashy systems, but you need to have the know-how and the people behind them,” he says. “The problem at some airports is that you have a free-for-all marketplace. The more players there are involved in the handling process, the greater the chance of bags getting lost. There are a lot of handling agents at Heathrow.”
In one respect, however, Frankfurt faces very similar challenges to Heathrow – in both cases, planners in the 1950s and 1960s failed to foresee the potential for air travel, with the result that both hubs are constantly pushing at their capacity limits and running up against building regulations. Payne says: “With Heathrow, like with us, there should have been more extensive land banking done, but no one was thinking about that 40 years ago.”
Whereas Heathrow’s problem has been the ever-increasing sprawl of west London, Frankfurt’s expansion has been stymied in part by its location in the middle of Germany’s biggest city forest – and the national reverence for trees. As a result, although Frankfurt did get a third runway in the 1980s, planning permission for further expansion has been a very long time coming and the airport has suffered as a result. “Munich’s tremendous growth is the growth we couldn’t take – but it’s good to keep it in Germany,” says Payne.
The current drain of passengers to Munich, however, may soon be reversed. In December, the Hesse regional government finally gave the go-ahead for a E4 billion expansion programme at Frankfurt, including a third terminal and a fourth runway.
The latter is scheduled to open by the end of 2011 and will be located on the other side of the A3, and linked to the rest of the airport’s airside facilities by two taxiway bridges over the autobahn. At 2,800 metres, it will be shorter than the other three runways (all of which are 4,000 metres) and will be used for landings only, but it will increase the airport’s overall runway capacity by 50 per cent (from 80 to 120 co-ordinated movements per hour). The new runway will also be all-weather, which will be welcome news to passengers who have been stranded at Frankfurt in the winter months.
Terminal
3 will be built on the site of the former US Rhein-Main Air Base, which Fraport
acquired when the Americans finally left in 2005, and will increase the
airport’s capacity by more than 25 million passengers a year. In keeping with
Frankfurt’s “integrated terminal philosophy” and to ensure short connection times,
it will be linked to Terminals 1 and 2 by an extension to the existing Sky Line
people-mover, while baggage
will be transferred via a tunnel under the two
main runways.
No date has yet been given for the start of construction work, but the terminal’s innovative modular design means that it can be built in several phases. “We’re trying to decide how soon we should build and the latest thinking is to build sooner, but the priority is the runway,” says Payne.
A plethora of smaller projects are also in the pipeline, both landside and airside. The Airrail Centre Frankfurt, a vast glass and steel structure, is currently rising above the high-speed rail station and when finished will house two Hiltons (one a Garden Inn) and KPMG’s European headquarters, as well as thousands of square metres of atriums, gardens and shops.
Work is also due to start later this year on Lufthansa’s “Pier A0”, a 790-metre long structure which will add seven long-haul gates and four storeys of shops and restaurants to the western end of Terminal 1, and is expected to open in 2012. Payne says: “As capacity expansion comes on stream, we’ll be able to take a much better share of the market. We have all these projects and they’re all coming together, like a giant jigsaw.”
Another piece of that jigsaw will be put in place with the arrival of Lufthansa’s fleet of 15 A380s, the first of which is expected in August 2009. Frankfurt and Lufthansa have both been major players in the development of the superjumbo – when Terminal 2 opened in 1994, it was designed for an Airbus prototype which at the time was known as the “A3XX”.
Eleven years later, Frankfurt became the first airport in the world to receive the plane, now christened the A380, for compatibility testing. And with 12 docking positions already in place and a further eight due to be built at Terminal 3, as well as a dedicated Lufthansa Technik maintenance facility under construction, it looks set to become the main European base for the new aircraft. Payne says: “The superjumbo is the way the industry has to go to deal with huge increases in air traffic.”
Fraport is also hoping that its current expansion plan will help Frankfurt maintain its competitiveness in the global market, where it is facing a new type of competition from the Gulf states. Payne admits that, in some respects, not even the best European hubs can compete with countries which have unlimited finance, central government control and the whole desert to build in. “If you take the development at all the hubs in Europe, Dubai probably eclipses that,” he says. “Very long lead-in times for airport development are required here, which does put us at a huge competitive disadvantage.”
Lufthansa’s Hennemann, however, is less convinced that the new hubs will present a long-term challenge to their more established rivals. “The Middle East is competition but I wouldn’t say it is a threat,” he says. “Emirates has shown that its business model is working at this stage, but it has to prove that its growth rates are sustainable and that it can run for 20 years at the same quality. We have to work on what we’re doing well. We take good care of our customers and that is appreciated. We are building in Frankfurt, and in a few years we will have a hub which can give passengers what they need.”
Similarly, although some European hubs are worrying about the implication of the Open Skies agreement, Payne is relaxed about its possible effect on Frankfurt’s business. “I’m not sure that airlines will start jumping into each other’s backyard – it’s contrary to the whole idea of alliances and hubbing, and it diminishes the synergy effect from the hub,” he says. “There’ll be a lot of testing the waters in the market, but I don’t think it’ll be an all-out offensive. In any case, for us at Frankfurt, practically everyone is here already.”
Frankfurt Facts
More people live within 200km of Frankfurt airport (38 million) than in the same area around Heathrow.
Frankfurt’s baggage-handling system is the longest in the world, with 70km of conveyor belts.
For every tree cut down in Frankfurt airport’s development, another has to be planted somewhere else.
Frankfurt is the only airport with its own song, performed by its employees. It’s called “Baby if we try, we can ride across the sky” and can be downloaded at airportcity-frankfurt.com.
