KLM will stop overnight passenger flights at Schiphol within two months

KLM will stop operating passenger flights at Schiphol Airport during overnight hours from the end of March. This is a measure that the airline had previously promised to Infrastructure Minister Mark Harbers to reduce noise pollution that residents near the airport experience.

The Dutch airline will not schedule flights to depart or land at Schiphol between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. once the summer season timetable is underway the airline confirmed after it was first reported by Luchtvaartnieuws. For the most part, this means that four intercontinental flights will not land at the airport between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m., but will land a bit later.

The updated timetable on KLM's website shows the flights it operates from Lagos, Accra, Atlanta and Paramaribo will have an adjusted schedule, but not necessarily flights operated by its partner airlines. Changes will begin from March 30, and will include timetable adjustments ranging from a few minutes to a few hours.

The intervention does not mean the end of overnight flights at Schiphol. Budget airline Transavia, also part of the Air France - KLM group, is still planning to depart or land at Schiphol at night or early in the morning. There are also cargo flights in the early morning hours.

Schiphol itself presented plans in last April to ban overnight flights to the greatest extent possible, which should lead to 10,000 fewer overnight flights. Officially, everything between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. counts as overnight at the airport.

Harbers formally announced last September that the Cabinet wanted annual overnight flight movements to be reduced from 32,000 to 28,700 starting this coming November. Those targets for overnight flights were part of a plan to reduce the number of annual permitted flights from 500,000 to 452,500 from November.

According to Harbers, it is "unlikely" that Schiphol will actually significantly reduce flights in the autumn, because the European Commission has yet to make a judgment about it.