AMSTERDAM's Schiphol Airport is taking a pragmatic approach to flight capacity limitations while continuing to work to protect freighter flights by lobbying to ring-fence slots for cargo aircraft.

In an interview with London's Air Cargo News, Schiphol head of cargo Joost van Doesburg says that the hub will remain an important place for freight despite reaching capacity in terms of the number of flights it can handle.

He points out that in 2023 cargo volumes at the airport declined at a lower rate than many of its rivals in what was a difficult year for air cargo.

However, he adds that the slot limit of 500,000 would put the number of all-cargo aircraft flights under pressure.

He says there is a "slow decline" in the number of freighter flights - pointing out that in January 2024 there were 1,307 freighter movements compared with 1,327 a year earlier, a drop off of 20.

"This will continue in my opinion for two reasons," says Mr van Doesburg. "Firstly, airlines are swapping their full freighter slots to passenger slots.

"It is very clear you can make more money on a passenger plane than on a freighter plane in a congested airport - we are completely sold out so that is why they are swapping slots.

"Secondly, you still see that many cargo airlines are not really used to operating in a congested airport or an airport where no slots are available."

He explains that some freighter operators lose their slots if they fail to operate 80 per cent of flights as allocated and all-cargo operations are more susceptible to delays than passenger operations given the nature of the business.

To help protect cargo flights, Mr van Doesburg says the airport - along with the local air cargo community - is lobbying to ring-fence slots for freighters.

"We have in total 500,000 slots and we want to put a fence around 2.5 per cent for freighter slots so that they cannot be swapped and so at least when a freighter operator loses their slots, another freighter operator will get the slots instead of a passenger airline."

A limit of 2.5 per cent was chosen because this matches the percentage of freighter flights currently handled at the airport, he explained.