Airlines have welcomed the ruling by a Dutch court on Wednesday that the government cannot impose a stricter cap on the number of flights at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport with the start of next winter's schedule. The major Northern European hub now may handle 500,000 flights annually, but authorities in the Netherlands in February decided to curtail its capacity to 440,000 annual movements to reduce noise levels in two steps. In the first step, the government sought to introduce a temporary arrangement to reduce the number of annual flights to 440,000 from November.
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), Airlines for America, and several carriers that fly into Schiphol—including Air Canada, United Airlines, FedEx, JetBlue, British Airways, Vueling, and Lufthansa—launched legal action to halt the application of this so-called experimental regulation. KLM and other carriers based at the airport lodged similar legal action, arguing that airlines structure their operations for the long term and that the Dutch authorities did not follow the procedure prescribed by EU law.
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