Europe airport traffic seen down over 8 pct in Jan

Olivier Jankovec told us that freight traffic, an indicator of trade, had fallen 21.4 percent in December year-on-year, with further bad news to come.

"On a gut feeling, we'll see a decline of 5 percent in 2009 for the whole European airport industry, but there's a lot of uncertainty about the depth and length of the crisis," he added.