This is information that has gone almost unnoticed in the news but is indicative of a known situation in certain European countries, first of all France. In this case, it is about the closure of the British airport of Doncaster-Sheffield.
Like France, the UK has its share of totally useless small commercial airports whose queues, usually heavily subsidized, and crowds are kept to the bare minimum.
What’s more, many are in direct competition with larger platforms, often not very far away and with which, logically, it can be thought that they are not in a position to compete. Indeed, this was the case at Doncaster-Sheffield airport in central England, which faced competition from Manchester and East Midlands, which has just closed due to lack of traffic, resources and buyers.
On this side of the Canal, it is hardly better and even worse with 120 airports in our territory that receive commercial passengers. Or the European record in terms of density.
But why interest? Especially when you know that a platform needs to receive around a million passengers a year to function, that more than half of French airports only handle ultra-limited traffic, or that the vast majority have deficits and receive public aid for up to! the point that in certain airlines these subsidies can reach up to €1,700 per passenger!
And if there are cases where we can, of course, talk about territorial continuityOtherwise we have the right to ask ourselves some questions. Because, once again, what interest if not to satisfy the ego of certain local elected officials, the laziness of passengers who want to have everything at hand, or this type of frenzied egalitarianism for everything and nothing increasingly in tune with the times.
Because rather than spending hundreds of millions on useless lines that make companies like Ryanair fatten, wouldn’t it be smarter to develop other modes of transport or a quick access network to other more important ones?
Thus, it must be said, in the state of affairs at airports such as Agen, Brive, Rouen, Castres, Dijon, Angers, perigueuxLe Puy, Tours, Lorient and many others are strictly useless and simply deserve to be closed…
As a reminder :
if in France there are about 120 airports that serve commercial passengers, there are 38 in Germany, 33 in the United Kingdom, 25 in Spain and 17 in Italy.
Only ten metropolitan airports generate 90% of the country’s traffic and only about twenty French airports have enough traffic to manage financially.
Thirty airports in France have a commercial traffic of less than 10,000 passengers per year, or less than 30 people per day.
Finally, the total public, state and local aid granted to metropolitan airports is estimated at almost 200 million euros per year.
