Flight operations at Hahn Airport in Hunsrück will continue in full despite the insolvency proceedings that have started.

According to the provisional insolvency administrator, the Frankfurt lawyer Jan Markus Plathner, the payment of the wages and salaries of the employees will be ensured through a pre-financing of the insolvency money.

Jochen Remmert

Airport editor and correspondent Rhein-Main-Süd.

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This exhausts what can currently be said with certainty about the future of the former flagship regional airport.

Around 500 employees are reportedly affected by the bankruptcy on the Hahn.

Great confidence does not arise because the business model of the airport, which is around 120 kilometers from Frankfurt between the villages of Lautzenhausen and Hahn (Rhein-Hunsrück district), did not work properly even before the corona pandemic, with its dramatic effects on air traffic as a whole , a profitable business was a long way off.

With the crisis it now seems almost impossible to find new donors.

Especially since the HNA Group, which took over a majority stake in Hahn in 2017, has itself got into trouble.

Even the good freight business is unlikely to change that.

According to the airport association ADV, the freight on the Hahn in August increased by 17.5 percent compared to the same month last year.

As in Frankfurt, the Hunsrück Airport also benefited from the boom in online trading and the bottlenecks in maritime transport.

Nevertheless, there is not much to suggest that the rooster will ever become profitable through the freight business alone.

Because there, too, a major player is missing on the Hunsrück.

One like the Deutsche Post subsidiary DHL in Leipzig, which employs 6,000 people at its freight hub, handles a good 2,000 tons of freight a day and handles 23,600 flight movements a year.

Structural problems

It also seems unlikely that the passenger business at Hahn Airport will recover from the change in strategy of the Irish low-cost airline Ryanair, which almost completely turned its back on its former base in Germany in order to operate from larger commercial airports.

The Irish are now even represented at Germany's largest air traffic hub in Frankfurt, which their boss Michael O'Leary used to refer to as completely absurd. At the moment, it does not seem likely that masses of tourists from the new Chinese medium-sized businesses will quench their wanderlust via Hahn Airport, of all places. The potential in the new Asian middle class is certainly great, but why shouldn't these tourists head for Frankfurt, for example? Even in the management floor of the former military airport itself, it was no longer expected that streams of tourists from China could soon push the rooster into profitability.

According to Eric Heymann, who as an analyst at Deutsche Bank Research also deals with air traffic, the structural problems of regional airports have basically not changed. However, they are all the more important in the current times of crisis, as he says. Heymann presented a study on regional airports back in 2005 and updated it years later. A key result of his analysis says that the bundling of passenger and freight flows is the most important prerequisite for operating these business areas profitably. But, according to Heymann, that is precisely what is difficult to implement at regional airports. In his opinion, two things will determine the weal and woe of regional airports in the near future: How strictly will the EU deal with state aid for regional airports from 2024?and how will the climate policy requirements for air traffic develop.

There is agreement in the industry that flying will become more expensive for reasons of climate protection. There is much to suggest that the regional airports, which are characterized by low-cost airlines, will come under greater pressure. Long before the Corona crisis, the EU ordered Hahn Airport to generate at least its operating costs by 2024 at the latest. So far, Rhineland-Palatinate, which sold its shares to HNA for 15 million euros in 2017, has made up for the deficits. A high double-digit million amount is expected to flow by 2024.

The state of Hesse still holds 17.5 percent of the Hahn, but has no financial obligations.

As the responsible Ministry of Finance announced on Wednesday, the strategic interests of the state in view of the Hahn have changed since the exit of the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport AG in 2019.

Therefore one is still ready to sell the shares.