AIRLINES may be forced to axe Dublin Airport flights over moves to limit capacity next year.
The Dublin Airport passenger cap was imposed in 2007 by An Bord Pleanala as a planning condition for the DAA’s development of Terminal 2.
It had been expected that the IAA would limit capacity as Dublin Airport has reached the cap of 32 million passengers a year, which is allowed under existing planning permission.
In a draft decision issued earlier this month, The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) proposed implementing a seating capacity of 25.2 million seats during the airport’s summer period, which runs from the end of March to October.
The IAA has already placed a seat cap of 14.4m for the winter season, which begins at the end of October and runs until March.
The passenger cap has meant that airlines will have to slash seat numbers available to those coming in and out of Dublin Airport – which is expected to be in the region of one million cuts.
Ryanair confirmed to the Irish Times that it was forced to cut routes last winter – with only a handful returning this summer.
These flights included Asturias, Castellon and Santiago, Carcassonne in France and Leipzig and Nuremberg in Germany.
Aer Lingus said that it is “continuing to assess the impact of the IAA’s draft decision reducing capacity for summer 2025”.
The IAA has said that the proposed seat limit will cause “little if any” scope for new flight offerings for airlines next year.
They said: “The IAA anticipates that the demand for slots for the Summer 2025 scheduling season would significantly exceed the proposed seat cap.
“In line with the Slot Regulation, air carriers who have operated series of slots (5 weeks or longer) in the Summer 2024 season would be given priority, on initial coordination, in relation to those series for Summer 2025.
“However, the IAA anticipates that not all slot series from Summer 2024 would be capable of being accommodated within the proposed seat cap.
“In addition, the IAA anticipates that, like Winter 2024, this proposal would result in very little, if any, available capacity for new slot requests, or for ad hoc slot requests, for passenger flights using the capacity of Terminal 1 or Terminal 2 during the Summer 2025 scheduling season.
“Such an outcome, and its implications for airlines, Dublin Airport and the travelling public flows as a consequence of the planning condition itself.”
