Clear jump to 2021
Ministry employees are flying more domestically again
07/15/2023, 10:40 am
Germans generally use fewer and fewer domestic flights. But not all of them: employees of the federal ministries are flying more within Germany again. In 2022 alone, 5330 flights will be booked. That is almost a third more than in the previous year.
After the corona pandemic, the employees of the federal ministries are again choosing the plane more as a means of transport for domestic business trips. This emerges from a request from the left faction to the Ministry of Finance, as reported by “Spiegel”. According to this, the employees of the departments, the Chancellery, the Federal Press Office and the Minister of State for Culture booked 4009 flights within Germany in 2021. The costs for this amounted to almost one million euros. In 2022, however, there were already 5,330 flights, an increase of almost a third. These cost 1.3 million euros.
By mid-June 2023, 3,114 flight bookings for just under 820,000 euros can be traced back to the employees of the federal ministries. Around three quarters of air travel takes place between Berlin and Cologne/Bonn. This is due to the fact that all ministries also have branches at the former West German seat of government in Bonn.
This frequent flying within the country is met with a lack of understanding on the part of the opposition. “After the corona crisis, I expected the federal government to push digitization,” says Gesine Lötzsch, head housekeeper of the left-wing faction. After all, “Zoom conferences are better for the climate than domestic flights”.
The German population decides differently, because domestic flights are declining sharply. According to the air traffic control organization Eurocontrol, 38 percent fewer domestic flights were registered in 2022 than in 2019, a year before the pandemic.
Just a few days ago, the federal government presented its plans for climate adaptation to better protect Germany from extreme weather such as drought, heavy rain or heat. The earth has already warmed up by about 1.1 degrees compared to pre-industrial times, in Germany it is even 1.6 degrees.