EUROPEAN AIRPORTS


HELSINKI If you had to design a perfect hub


airport, Helsinki would come close. First, it is small – much smaller than most hubs, and smaller than many airports that have no aspirations to be a hub.


Located under one roof (the airport map shows two terminals, but it’s still effectively one building), Helsinki served 15 million passengers in 2013 and is aiming for 20 million by 2020. With three operational runways, it has plenty of capacity to spare, and firm plans for expanding its operations. Second, it’s reliable. Despite sharing a latitude with Anchorage in Alaska, it has closed only once in the past ten years or so – for less than an hour in 2003, owing to a snowstorm. It also boasts of having 98.5 per cent on-time departures, although these figures are from the airport, which records only delays that it is responsible for. Flight data specialist OAG rates punctuality at the airport as “average”. Third, it is focused on being a


hub. Yes, it offers plenty of direct flights, both for those flying to and from Helsinki within the region and Europe as a whole, but its main strategic objective is connecting traffic. As chief executive Kari Savolainen says: “Finland does not have a big enough domestic


28 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2015


population for point-to-point traffic to be the real focus for us.” Instead, it encourages airlines to use it as a hub by keeping its costs down, partly because it owns the airport land, and partly through efficiency, offering short minimum connection times of 25-40 minutes depending on the route details. Fourth is its location. Savolainen points out that the focus on connecting traffic is an obvious one “when you look at the map”. “Within 12 hours’ flight from the airport, look at where you can reach,” he says. “We are an epicentre for Asia, but also for Russia. St Petersburg is only three or four hours from Helsinki, so it’s in our catchment area.” Helsinki is in the right place for European travellers wishing to fly to Asia, being positioned on the Great Circle Route between the continents. The shared aims of Finnair and the airport to capture Asian traffic provide Helsinki’s fifth key advantage. The two work together more closely than, for instance, Heathrow and British Airways are ever likely to, and since half of Finnair’s capacity is on Asian routes, airline president and chief executive Pekka Vauramo is unequivocal about the airport’s importance. When I interviewed him earlier


this year, he even admitted that for most travellers, Finnair’s product


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HELSINKI IN NUMBERS


15 MILLION PASSENGERS (2013)


2 MILLION TRANSFERRING PASSENGERS


1 MILLION TRANSFERRING TO AND FROM ASIA


130 DIRECT FLIGHTS


12 DAILY CONNECTING FLIGHTS TO ASIA


MINIMUM CONNECTING TIMES:


• FLIGHTS WITHIN FINLAND: 25–35 MINUTES


35 MINUTES 40 MINUTES


• WITHIN SCHENGEN AREA:


• FROM SCHENGEN TO NON-SCHENGEN AREA:


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