After two pandemic years, which were also terrible for the aviation industry, there is finally the prospect of a summer with many passengers again: the CEO of a listed company actually likes to present such prospects to the general meeting.

This is no different in the case of Fraport CEO Stefan Schulte.

But Schulte also had things to say at the general meeting on Wednesday that cloud the outlook, which is so pleasing for the company and for the shareholders.

The shedding of around 4,000 jobs within a very short space of time undoubtedly made a quick and effective contribution to reducing costs, which at the lowest point of the crisis were offset by practically no income because nobody was flying anymore.

Suddenly it was as quiet at Germany's largest airport as you might otherwise know from Kassel-Calden in northern Hesse.

However, according to the company management, job cuts of this magnitude will now prove to be a stumbling block when it comes to managing the long-awaited growth in passenger numbers in such a way that the quality of the services at Frankfurt Airport meets their own requirements.

Bottleneck in summer?

The situation on the labor market is not such that Fraport can quickly fall back on an inexhaustible pool of motivated and qualified men and women who are just waiting for a job at the airport.

Accordingly, criticism from Frankfurt's main customer Lufthansa will not be long in coming if the possibly too drastic job cuts actually lead to the summer bottleneck now also feared by the Management Board.

Although Lufthansa has also cut almost 40,000 jobs to get through the crisis, it has also significantly reduced the fleet.

The airport operator Fraport, on the other hand, has to use the same terminal capacity as in the years before the pandemic in order to be able to cope with the peaks expected for the summer in such a way that there is no chaos.

In this respect, Fraport's airport managers can only hope that their recruitment campaign will work well.