BAA?s seven UK airports handled a total of 10.9m passengers in December, an increase of 1.6% on December 2005, raising the calendar year total by 2.3% to 147.7m.

In a statement, the airports company said: ‘Each of BAA?s airports was affected by the foggy conditions which persisted in the south of England for much of the last week before Christmas, normally a particularly busy period. In total it is estimated that the loss in traffic handled as a result of the fog amounted to about 175,000 passengers, around 1.7% of the total which would have been carried had it not been for the cancellations to flights caused by the bad weather.’
Of the individual markets, BAA said that domestic and short-haul European services were most disrupted by the bad weather. As a result domestic traffic was down 5.8%, while growth on European scheduled routes was reduced to 3.0%. North Atlantic traffic grew 1.1%, and other long-haul routes recorded a collective increase of 8.1%.
Among individual airports, as a result of the disruption to its domestic traffic, Heathrow traffic was down 2.4%. Gatwick was less affected by the fog and saw a passenger increase of 8.8%, taking its annual figure past 34m for the first time. Stansted was up 3.9%, whilst Southampton saw growth of 2.2%.
Cut backs in London services also hit all three Scottish airports. As a result, each experienced a drop in recent growth trends.
Glasgow saw growth of 2.3%, whilst Edinburgh and Aberdeen grew 0.3%, and 9.5% respectively. Glasgow Airport actually had a record year as international passenger numbers continued to grow and Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen all benefited from expanded international routes with more than 30 new services introduced across all three airports in 2006, including flights to Berlin, Helsinki, Hamburg, Warsaw, Atlanta and Orlando.