01-07-2025
Manchester Airports Group handles a record 64m passengers
Manchester Airports Group, which also owns Stansted and East Midlands airports, racked up a record year handling more than 64 million passengers in total while profits were up sharply.
Total group revenues in the year to the end of March came in at £1.3 billion, up 8 per cent, while earnings before interest, tax and other deductions rose 12 per cent to £570 million.
Manchester airport handled 31.1 million passengers, the first time it had exceeded the 30 million mark. Stansted, London's third airport, handled 29.1 million. East Midlands, between Nottingham and Derby, which is more of a freight hub, handled 4 million passengers.
In total, Manchester Airports Group or MAG handles about three quarters as many passengers as the four terminals at Heathrow, the busiest airport in Europe. Manchester airport itself is the country's third largest airport after Gatwick.
'Our airports are engines of growth for the regions they serve,' Ken O'Toole, MAG's chief executive, said. 'As the UK's largest private investor in transport infrastructure outside London, we're creating jobs, supporting local economies, enabling trade and tourism and ensuring prosperity is shared across the country.'
The long-term prospects of Manchester becoming a Heathrow of the north were dealt a blow by HS2. The over-budget, high-speed railway has been scrapped north of Birmingham but was originally supposed to go on north to Manchester, with a transport nexus adjacent to the airport connecting west-east rail links between Liverpool and Leeds and the other cities of Yorkshire and the Northeast.
Manchester airport is in the last of a ten-year transformation programme and the creation of a new terminal which has not always enabled the smoothest of experiences for passengers in recent times. It hopes to get passenger numbers up to 50 million a year.
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Its mainstay airlines include easyJet, Ryanair and the holiday carriers Tui and Jet2.
While British Airways only flies a Heathrow-Manchester shuttle service, Virgin Atlantic has set up an international hub there alongside the other intercontinental operators Emirates, Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Turkish and a clutch of Chinese airlines.
MAG announced on Tuesday that IndiGo is to launch services between Manchester and Mumbai, its first flights to anywhere in Europe or the UK. IndiGo is the main competitor carrier to Air India, which is reeling from the Ahmedabad air disaster in which 260 people lost their lives.
Manchester airport hopes to get passenger numbers up to 50 million a year
MARTIN RICKETT/PA WIRE
Stansted, which was acquired during the forced break-up of the old BAA by the competition authorities, is the UK home of Ryanair which accounts for more than two thirds of passengers going through the Essex airport, and about one eighth of the Irish budget airline's pan-European operations.
Stansted is about to go through a £1.1 billion five-year investment to stretch its capacity to 43 million a year — about the same number that Gatwick currently handles. It is asking the permission of the local council to sign off on plans to extend further to a capacity of 51 million passengers.
