Netherlands’ Schiphol Airport to invest $6.7 billion over next 5 years to boost capacity

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(Fixes spelling of “Schiphol” in headline and paragraphs 1,3)

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, one of Europe’s main aviation hubs, on Friday pledged to invest 6 billion euros ($6.65 billion) by 2029 in what it called the largest investment plan in its history.

The airport extended a previously announced investment of 3 billion euros from 2024-2027, saying large parts of the planned renewal and maintenance works at the airport would continue afterwards. 

“Our infrastructure is the foundation of our service, but is currently far from what we want to offer our passengers as a quality airport in the Netherlands,” Schiphol CEO Pieter van Oord said in a statement. 

Schiphol added that for the full year 2024 it expects a total number of passengers of between 65 and 68 million and a total number of flights of between 470,000 and 473,000.

The Dutch government last year tried to limit flights with the support of Schiphol to around 450,000, or 10% below 2019 levels, in a bid to limit noise.    But it bowed to industry pressure and objections from the European Union, which said it should first look at other possibilities to cut noise. In December Schiphol said it would have the capacity for 483,000 flights this year.

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(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel and Stephanie van den Berg, Editing by Charlotte Van Campenhout and Miral Fahmy)