million figure for Lufthansa Cargo which will have shift many of its flights them to the Cologne/Bonn airport.

“We expect significant losses running into double-digit million figure,” Lufthansa Cargo’s chief executive Karl Ulrich Garnadt recently told journalists in Berlin.  However, he could not give exact figures but, he added, that the damages would be in the region of the double-digit million estimate made by the carrier.

But many German experts say that Lufthansa Cargo’s losses would lie between 30 and 50 million Euros.  Because of the ban, the carrier would have to re-locate its five weekly night flights to the Cologne/Bonn airport, and even completely cancel some flights to China.

Garnadt did not mince words when he said that the night flight ban forced the carrier to iron out a flight schedule that was “economically and ecologically absurd“.  According to the new schedule, the pilots would fly in the evening with the loaded aircraft from Frankfurt to Cologne/Bonn from where the aircraft would fly, three or four hours later, to China, provided the Russian air corridor was free and the landing timings in the Far East could be maintained. In fact, the additional starts and landings would generate more noise and fuel consumption, Lufthansa Cargo‘s chief executive said.

He also said that, at least, one MD-11 freighter will be transferred from Frankfurt to Cologne/Bonn airport to maintain the overnight flight for the German logistics industry to North America as this could no longer be guaranteed from Frankfurt because of the night-flight ban.

Garnadt painted a grim situation for Germany’s foreign trade.  As “world champion“ in exports, Germany relied on dependable connections to ship air cargo to destinations around the world. Frankfurt airport played a highly important role because some 40 percent of German exports is transported by air.  The night-flight ban in Frankfurt threatened to cut off Germany from the global trade lanes, Garnadt said, warning that closing the world’s seventh biggest airport for six hours each night and thereby decoupling it from the international goods traffic would serve a severe blow to the air-traffic industry.

Garnadt also received backing from other organisations.  The executive director of the Federal German Air-Traffic Association, Matthias von Randow, said that “it (Frankfurt) is Germany’s most important international air-traffic hub“.  Frankfurt handled some 70 percent of the nation’s air-cargo traffic.  Business needed night flights.   There had been no night-flight ban in the past, with Frankfurt recording some 50 aircraft movements a night.

Small logistics companies would also be badly hit by the abruptly imposed night flight ban at Frankfurt airport.  The decision had been a slap in the face of the small companies, claimed the managing director of cargo carrier Nightexpress, Yvonne Boag.  After Lufthansa Cargo, Nightexpress is the second-largest provider of cargo night flights from Frankfurt and has been organising night cargo flights since nearly 30 years.  She lamented that without special nigh flights, the company would lose not only turnover and customers but also the “good reputation as an emergency logistics company“.

But ecologically oriented associations such as the Traffic Club of Germany criticized the politicians.  Chancellor Angela Merkel was taking part in a “show act of the industry“ to ignore “the environmental consequences of air traffic“, the association said.  The expansion of various airports had led to a dramatic rise in noise in daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people, as the nationwide protests showed.

The timing of the court ban on night flights could not have been worse.  It was imposed just as the fourth tarmac was to have been officially opened at Frankfurt, with Chancellor Merkel personally attending the inauguration.

Frankfurt airport is “deeply concerned“ whether it would be able to maintain its position as the nation’s leading air-cargo hub in the future.  The court imposed a strict ban on flights between 11:00 pm and 05:00 am effective October 31, the start of the winter plan.

Frankfurt airport has up to 50 night flights between these hours. Garnadt hoped that the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig (the supreme court of appeal) would allow a minimum of necessary night flights when passing the final judgment expected early 2012.

Management representatives of the airlines affected by the night-flight ban are, understandably, angry.  The mood at Lufthansa Cargo, as one insider cautiously puts it, is one of “sheer frustration”

Representatives of Lufthansa Cargo, Night Express or the Condor have been holding internal crisis meetings on how to react to the “emergency” at the Frankfurt hub.  For Lufthansa Cargo, in particular, the ban comes as a big setback, considering that it will be losing some 1,600 slots which had been allocated to it in the entire winter plan for operating flights between 11:00 pm and 05:00 am. Lufthansa Cargo’s situation is particularly difficult and leaves it very little maneuver room because its logistics operations are  fine-tuned with various partners worldwide and also coordinated with the cargo capacities of the passenger fleet of its parent company.

A Lufthansa Cargo spokesperson said that the new restrictions at Frankfurt airport would mean a heavy financial burden on the carrier running into millions.  Besides the significant loss of revenue, there are also, at least 2,100 jobs directly affected and another 1,600 with external service providers dependent on the carrier’s operations, according to a 2009 study.  Indeed, the logistics industry with a total of 146,000 workers is the second most-important employer, after the financial sector, in the Rhine-Main region.

Lufthansa Cargo Shell-Shocked After Good Performance in First Nine Months

The night-flight ban at Frankfurt airport has shell-shocked the cargo carrier, particularly as it came on the heels of a satisfactory performance in the first nine months when it reported a 8.4 percent rise in its cargo volume over the year-earlier period. Capacity increased by 12.3 percent.  With sales recording a 9.5 percent growth, Lufthansa Cargo could achieve a high level of capacity utilization.  The cargo load factor in the first nine months was 69.3 percent.

“Lufthansa Cargo is well-positioned in an increasingly demanding market environment,” Garnadt had said.  “After the very strong growth rates in the first half of the year, our transport performance in the third quarter stabilized at the very high prior-year level.”

The cargo carrier strong performance was all the more remarkable given the increasingly tough times faced by the market as a result of economic uncertainties worldwide.  Indeed, growth in Asia, considered a power engine, had been weaker than in the previous year.  Lufthansa Cargo earned an operating profit of 173 million euros, even though the rapid growth rates of recent months could not be maintained.