The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has published a draft decision on Dublin Airport’s Summer 2025 Capacity, proposing a seat capacity limit of 25.2 million seats for the Summer 2025 scheduling season.
The Summer 2025 scheduling season runs from March 30th to October 25th, 2025.
The IAA said they are responsible for the implementation of the EU Airport Slot Regulation, which aims to ensure that, where airport capacity is scarce, the maximum available capacity is identified for each scheduling season, used efficiently, and distributed in a fair and transparent way by means of the allocation of take-off and landing slots by an independent coordinator.
Capacity is declared to the detailed level of up to 10 minute intervals to ensure all capacity is maximised.
The IAA’s role includes identifying and determining the capacity at Dublin Airport and setting the consequent parameters for slot allocation, and in doing so, the IAA is required to take account of all relevant technical, operational and environmental constraints.
These constraints include the capacity of runways, airspace capacity, availability of aircraft stands, various passenger processes such as check-in and security screening, and planning constraints imposed on daa by the planning authorities in the form of planning conditions.
They said the proposed limit is the same outlined by DAA, the operator of Dublin Airport, during the deliberations of the coordination committee, in which DAA also stated that the IAA should have regard to the condition.
The members of the coordination committee include Dublin Airport and the air carriers using Dublin Airport, and the committee is tasked by the Slot Regulation with providing proposals and/or advice to the IAA.
The IAA’s proposal would make Summer 2025 the second scheduling season in which a seat cap to take account of the 32 million passengers per annum.
For Winter 2024 (October 26th, 2024 to March 29th, 2025) the seat cap is 14.4 million.
They said the proposal for Summer 2025 would result in a total seat capacity of 39.6 million across the two seasons.
The seat cap is greater than the passenger cap as it takes account of expected load factors (how many passengers are expected on each flight relative to the total number of seats on the aircraft), and an adjustment for transfer passengers.
The IAA anticipates that the demand for slots for the Summer 2025 scheduling season would significantly exceed the proposed seat cap.
In addition, the IAA anticipates that, like Winter 2024, this proposal would result in very little, if any, available capacity for new slot requests, or for ad hoc slot requests, for passenger flights using the capacity of Terminal 1 or Terminal 2 during the Summer 2025 scheduling season.
Such an outcome, and its implications for airlines, Dublin Airport and the travelling public flows as a consequence of the planning conditions itself.
The IAA said they are holding a consultation on the draft decision, and invites interested parties to make written submissions by email to consultation@iaa.ie by September 26th. The IAA will make its final decision on the Summer 2025 capacity in October.
