In December 2024, Ardian became the largest shareholder in Heathrow Airport, one of the world’s most strategic and critical air travel hubs. Subsequently in July 2025 Ardian reinforced its leading position with the acquisition of an additional stake. Building on its successful record of airport investments, the firm is pursuing a multi-billion-pound modernization and expansion plan.
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83.9m
Passengers in 2024
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230
International destinations served by Heathrow
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99%
Capacity utilization
Acquiring a major stake in the world’s most connected airport puts Ardian at the center of a complex web of stakeholders including airlines, the UK government, local authorities, regulators, Heathrow’s management, around 8,000 direct employees and 80,000 people working on site, local communities and tens of millions of travellers.
There are myriad perspectives on Heathrow’s future within this group, but broad agreement on one topic at least: the airport has no spare capacity to grow. Heathrow currently operates at 99% of capacity – well above the level of most other airports – and faces fast-rising demand for air travel.
Many of the Tier 2 airports still haven’t recovered passenger numbers since Covid and yet Heathrow last year exceeded pre-2020 traffic, with nearly 84 million passengers.
The UK government has publicly stated its support for the expansion of Heathrow with the third runway. But achieving that could take a decade or more, and in the meantime passenger numbers will continue to rise, requiring Heathrow to invest in efficiency and streamline its operations. The airport already achieves world-class performance in key areas, such as the 93% of passengers that pass through security in under five minutes, enabling it to deal with its chronic lack of headroom.
Even in a spaced-constrained environment, we’ve improved on-time performance and delivered strong security results by working closely with airlines and other partners. With hundreds of millions of pounds invested in infrastructure like new security lanes and baggage systems, we’ll continue enhancing the Heathrow experience and strengthening the UK’s global connections
A successful record of airport investments
Ardian’s experience as a hands-on owner of international airports since 2013 will be vital as it implements its expansion plan for Heathrow. At London Luton, it expanded the airport’s capacity significantly, building a new terminal, improving transport infrastructure and creating large number of jobs, while maintaining close dialogue with the airport’s many stakeholders. Ardian also incentivized airlines to reduce their emissions by charging lower landing fees for newer, more fuel efficient and quieter aircraft, says Juan Angoitia, Co-Head of Infrastructure Europe and Senior Managing Director at Ardian.
During its ownership of a group of major Italian airports, including the two Milan airports (Malpensa and Linate) and Naples, the firm developed Ardian Air Carbon, a software tool for monitoring and modelling greenhouse gas emissions. This enabled Naples to reduce aircraft emissions on take-off by altering flight trajectories, demonstrating Ardian’s innovative approach to sustainability in aviation.
The route to a sustainable aviation industry
At Heathrow, growth must go hand in hand with a more climate-friendly operating model in which sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) will play a pivotal role, says Thomas Woldbye, the airport’s CEO. Heathrow already provides a subsidy to help airlines use more SAF, but much greater supplies of the fuel are going to be needed.
It’s a chicken and egg situation because without contracts, firms cannot produce the SAF and without SAF production at scale, airlines cannot switch. You need the technology, regulators, policymakers and operators to act together if the aviation sector is to make a major leap.
The Ardian team believes that, provided the key stakeholders are aligned behind plans for an expansion project and domestic supplies of SAF are secured, the way will be open for Heathrow to expand. This expansion would not only create jobs and benefit the UK economy; thanks to Heathrow’s huge network of connections to other airports worldwide, it would also help to accelerate the uptake of SAF and shift the aviation industry towards a more sustainable future of lower carbon emissions.
Heathrow is committed to net zero by 2050 and is updating its carbon forecasts to ensure future growth aligns with national climate goals and regulatory requirements. This will be a massive project, but if we have a strong partnership with the government and our customers, then shareholders such as Ardian can have the confidence to make that investment.
Deal Team
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Ardian
