Frankfurt Airport Expansion and Night Flights Update

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 02 FRANKFURT 000463 SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR EUR/AGS PASS TO EB SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: EAIR ECON EIND ENRG PGOV SENV EU GM SUBJECT: Frankfurt Airport Expansion and Night Flights Update REF: 07 BERLIN 2224, 07 STATE 146665 ¶1. SUMMARY: Numerous municipalities and several air carriers filed legal challenges to the Frankfurt airport expansion plan before the February 8 deadline, creating a legal tangle for a Hesse state court to sort out. The main sticking point in the plan to build an additional runway and terminal remains the proposed exceptions to the night flight ban, which the municipalities oppose because of the noise and the airlines see as essential for their business. The court will most likely have fifteen months to decide between the competing claims, with construction possibly beginning sometime in ¶2011. END SUMMARY. Challenged from All Sides -------------- ¶2. When the Frankfurt airport enlargement plan was published December 18, 2007, the Hesse state government gave all sides until February 8, 2008 to submit legal challenges. Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Mainz, Hanau, Offenbach and several smaller municipalities all filed lawsuits against the plan. Most objected to the seventeen proposed exceptions to the ban on night flights between 11:00 P.M. and 5:00 A.M. and the resulting increase in late evening noise. Several neighboring towns also expressed concern that the expansion of the airport will affect their own plans for growth. In the case of Frankfurt, CDU Lord Mayor Petra Roth was forced to go along with the challenge after her party and its coalition partner, the Greens, abstained in a city council vote per their original coalition agreement. Individual appeals, including class-action suits by affected groups, have a separate deadline of February 25. ¶3. Cargo and passenger carriers Lufthansa, Condor, TUIfly and Deutsche Post also filed lawsuits against the plan, claiming that the seventeen exceptions allowed are insufficient. [Note: Cargo and postal flights would have priority over passenger flights between 11 P.M. and 5 A.M., with passenger flights being banned outright between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M. End Note.] Condor and TUIfly, who are low-cost carriers, argue that their business is dependent on cheaper night flights and have said that 2,000 jobs are at stake should the plan go through as proposed. Companies who have their hubs in Frankfurt, such as Lufthansa, will have first claim to the seventeen flights, but Lufthansa says that it will need forty-one flights just for itself and may have to move its cargo operations if the plan goes through unchanged. What Comes Next? -------------- ¶4. Dr. Holger Sewering, head of project planning at the Hesse State Chancellery, told Econ Off and Econ Spec February 12 that he expects construction to begin in 2011, giving the Hesse Administrative Court twelve to fifteen months to consider all legal challenges. He was optimistic that the seventeen night flight exceptions would survive the appeals, since the government took great care to ensure that the plan would withstand challenge when drafting it. He said it was not clear whether the court would have to consider all individually or could rule on all of them at once. The ruling could also be appealed to the Federal Administrative Court, a move which Dr. Sewering felt was unlikely to succeed. He saw no chance of the federal government intervening in favor of the project on the basis of "national interest" despite past rumors to that effect. ¶5. Fraport AG, the managing company of the airport, could legally begin construction immediately, running the risk that it would have to stop if the lawsuits succeeded. Fraport officials had originally hoped that the new runway and terminal would be operational sometime in 2011. Dr. Sewering said, however, that Fraport had agreed to wait for the court's ruling. He anticipated that it might start some preparatory work on existing airport territory and would begin implementing the full project once the plan is upheld, even if an appeal were filed at the federal level. ¶6. According to Dr. Sewering, the fact that the future government of Hesse remains unclear following the January 27 state elections has had little impact on the airport expansion plan. Although Social Democratic candidate Andrea Ypsilanti promised to look into the plan were she to become Minister President, she would have no legal way to withdraw it. Current Minister President Roland Koch had promised in the past that no night flights would be allowed, but later backtracked after the Federal Administrative Court ruled that some exceptions had to be made for freight flights in the case of the Leipzig airport. Dr. Sewering expected that the capacity of the expanded airport would be sufficient until at least 2025. Coincidentally, over the past week the Cologne-Bonn airport extended authorization for night flights to remain operational through the year 2030, although this may also end up being challenged in the courts. FRANKFURT 00000463 002 OF 002 ¶7. COMMENT: Although there is room for optimism that the appeals process will be concluded with all deliberate speed, the outcome still hangs in the balance. The previous expansion plan was completed in the early 1980's only after decades of argument and numerous protests, some of them violent. Both the business community and the outgoing state government see the airport as an essential contributor to Frankfurt's status as a business hub. If the enlargement gets bogged down in legal challenges, air carriers may take the path of least resistance and shift their operations to other hubs. Indeed, last year FedEx decided to move their operations to the Cologne-Bonn airport beginning in 2010. ¶8. This cable was coordinated with Embassy Berlin. POWELL