OF the 48 airports in Spain, only nine made a profit in 2009. Alicante is at the head with 30.58 million followed by: Palma de Mallorca (26.58 million); Girona (12.66 million); South Tenerife (13.9m); Malaga (12.8m); Gran Canaria (6.5m); Ibiza (3.9m); San Javier (Murcia) (1.5m) and Bilbao (0.11m). Lanzarote and Sevilla broke even.

All in all, AENA (Spanish airports authority) airports finished the year with losses (before taxes) of 432.97 million euros, the most significant loss being that of Madrid-Barajas with 300 million.

It is expected that, in 2010, losses will reach 597.7 million bringing AENA’s accumulated debt to 10.48 billion euros against fixed assets of 15.3 billion euros.

In order to maximise efficiency of airports, those with less than 50 operations a day like Almeria will no longer have air traffic controllers. These being substituted by an automated system supervised by lover level technicians, ‘forcing air traffic controllers to compromise in a more significant way with the airport systems reform’ remarked Jose Blanco, Minister of Public Works, who deems the collective ‘Privileged’ (they have salaries exceeding 370,000 euros a year) blaming them, in part, for the current economic problems of Spanish airports.

via Euro Weekly News | 9 out of the 48 Spanish airports made money last year.