Madrid Up 6.6%, Alicante Up 11.5%, Frankfurt Up 1.6%: How Aena, Fraport and Zurich Closed September

Aena, which runs 46 airports and two heliports in Spain, London Luton, Leeds Bradford and 17 airports in Brazil, said its network closed September 2026 with 37,669,196 passengers, 3.9% more than in September 2025. Aircraft movements rose 4.9% to 318,246, while cargo fell 5.7% to 125,380 tonnes.

For January to September, the group reported 309,916,589 passengers, up 4.1%. Movements for the nine months came to 2,626,553 (up 3.9%), and cargo to 1,105,225 tonnes, which is 2% lower than in the same period of 2025.

Spain

The Spanish network handled 31,671,269 passengers in September, up 4.2%. Movements rose 5.3% to 263,064, and cargo fell 5.7% to 111,822 tonnes. For the first nine months, Spanish airports recorded 257,214,868 passengers (up 4.1%), 2,153,478 movements (up 4.5%) and 989,990 tonnes of cargo (up 0.9%).

Madrid-Barajas was the busiest airport in the network, with 6,313,660 passengers, a rise of 6.6%. Aena listed the next airports in order:

• Barcelona-El Prat: 5,417,608 passengers, up 2.6%
• Palma de Mallorca: 4,197,396, up 2%
• Malaga-Costa del Sol: 2,805,764, up 6.8%
• Alicante-Elche Miguel Hernandez: 2,127,532, up 11.5%
• Ibiza: 1,262,962, up 2.9%
• Gran Canaria: 1,194,194, up 0.7%
• Valencia: 1,129,165, up 5.4%

Alicante-Elche posted the largest increase among the eight airports Aena named. The operator did not attach reasons to the individual results in its release.

Madrid also led for operations, with 39,773 take-offs and landings, up 8.6%. Barcelona followed with 33,386 (up 3%), Palma with 28,782 (up 2%), Malaga with 18,766 (up 6.3%), Alicante with 13,146 (up 12.4%), Gran Canaria with 11,350 (up 3.9%) and Ibiza with 10,487, which was down 0.2%. Ibiza was the only one of the seven airports in that list to record fewer movements than a year earlier.

In cargo, Madrid-Barajas again ranked first with 62,417 tonnes, but the volume was 13.1% lower than in September 2025. Since Madrid accounts for more than half of the 111,822 tonnes the Spanish network moved, according to the release's own figures, its decline weighed on the network total. Barcelona-El Prat moved 18,634 tonnes (up 6.9%), Zaragoza 17,589 tonnes (up 6.8%) and Vitoria 6,544 tonnes (up 12.5%).

Brazil

Aena's 17 Brazilian airports recorded 3,806,751 passengers in September, an increase of 1.1%. Movements grew 3.9% to 38,552, and cargo fell 4.6% to 11,283 tonnes. From January to September the Brazilian airports handled 34,750,709 passengers (up 3.5%), 337,141 movements (up 0.6%) and 98,584 tonnes of cargo (up 1.7%).

Aena reports Brazil in two groups. The six-airport ANB group, which manages Recife, Maceio, Aracaju, Joao Pessoa, Juazeiro do Norte and Campina Grande, closed September with 1,406,618 passengers, up 1.6%. Recife alone had 812,064 passengers, 1.3% fewer than a year earlier. The group operated 13,115 flights (up 7.4%), of which Recife handled 6,885 (down 0.4%), and moved 5,852 tonnes of cargo, down 6.4%. Recife's cargo was 3,977 tonnes, down 18.2%.

The eleven-airport BOAB group, which includes Congonhas in Sao Paulo, recorded 2,400,133 passengers, up 0.8%. Congonhas had 2,025,732 passengers, up 0.3%. BOAB operated 25,437 flights (up 2.1%), of which Congonhas accounted for 17,397, down 2.2%. Cargo across the group was 5,431 tonnes, down 2.6%, with Congonhas at 4,491 tonnes, down 7.5%.

In footnotes, Aena states that ANB's airports registered 16,833,758 passengers in 2025 and BOAB's registered 28,853,683.

United Kingdom

London Luton handled 1,706,732 passengers in September, up 7.3%, on 12,656 movements (up 3.2%). Cargo, including mail, was 2,275 tonnes, 10% lower than a year earlier. Over the first nine months Luton recorded 14,281,578 passengers (up 6.2%), 105,558 movements (up 2.5%) and 16,651 tonnes of cargo, down 25.8%. Aena notes that passengers under two years old are not counted at Luton.

Leeds Bradford, which Aena says joined the group on 7 May, recorded 484,444 passengers, up 0.7%, with 3,974 movements, down 0.5%. For the first nine months the airport reported 3,669,434 passengers (up 2.9%) and 30,376 operations (up 2.7%).

Fraport: 21.1 million passengers, with Frankfurt still behind for the year

Fraport's release, distributed on 13 October, covers Frankfurt and the airports in its group portfolio. Frankfurt Airport handled about 6.1 million passengers in September, 1.6% more than a year earlier. Fraport said continued leisure demand supported the month, with school holidays still running in Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg.

Cargo, covering airfreight and airmail, came to 174,773 metric tonnes, up 2.5%. Aircraft movements fell 3.5% to 40,539 take-offs and landings. Fraport attributes the movement decline mainly to a 25.2% drop in domestic German flights, which it links to the suspension of services to Bremen and Stuttgart. Accumulated maximum take-off weight was about 2.5 million metric tonnes, down 1.2%.

The year-to-date picture is less favourable than the monthly one. From January to September Frankfurt handled about 47.5 million passengers, 0.2% fewer than in the same period of 2025. Fraport cites geopolitical tensions and strikes at Lufthansa, which it says affected almost 700,000 passengers at Frankfurt over the nine months. Without those strikes, the company says, growth would have been about 1.3%. That counterfactual is Fraport's own estimate.

The group portfolio

Across all airports Fraport actively manages, September traffic was about 21.1 million passengers, up 2.7%. The release says most international airports in the portfolio grew. The individual results were:

• Lima, Peru: about 2.3 million passengers, up 10.5%
• Ljubljana, Slovenia: 205,495 passengers, up 16.6%
• Greece, 14 airports combined: 5.7 million passengers, up 4.2%
• Burgas and Varna, Bulgaria, combined: 554,292 passengers, up 8.6%
• Antalya, Turkey: 5.1 million passengers, down 1.7%
• Brazil, combined: 1.2 million passengers

In Brazil, Fraport's two main airports, Fortaleza and Porto Alegre, grew 2.1% combined. The release says Jericoacoara is included for the first time, with 27,272 passengers following its recent addition to the network. Individual figures for Fortaleza and Porto Alegre are not given in the release.

Antalya was the only airport in Fraport's published list to report a decline. The release does not offer a reason for it.

Zurich: more flights, a slightly lower load factor

Zurich Airport's key traffic figures, published on 12 October and carried by the financial news service MarketScreener, show 3,126,906 passengers in September, up 2.6%. Of those, 2,226,178 were local passengers. Transfer passengers numbered 894,182 and made up 28.6% of the total.

Air traffic movements rose 5.2% to 25,661 take-offs and landings. Passengers per movement fell 2.8% to 138.5, and the seat load factor was 81.9%, which is 1.2 percentage points lower than a year earlier. The pattern of more flights and a slightly smaller average load is visible in the airport's own numbers, although the release does not discuss it.

Freight was reported at 34,841 tons, up 0.2%. The MarketScreener page indicates that the freight figure covers August rather than September, so it is not directly comparable with the other cargo numbers in this article.

Sources

• Aena, press release "Los aeropuertos del Grupo Aena cierran septiembre con algo mas de 37,6 millones de pasajeros", 13 October 2026 (aena.es)
• Fraport AG, "Fraport Traffic Figures - September 2026: Frankfurt Airport Reports Growth in Passenger Traffic and Cargo Volumes" (fraport.com)
• Flughafen Zurich, "Key traffic figures September 2026", via MarketScreener, 12 October 2026 (marketscreener.com)