A German court has approved a US$5.6 billion expansion plan for Frankfurt airport, Europe’s biggest air cargo hub, but passed the responsibility of deciding on whether night flights would continue, to politicisions. The court ruled that the state of Hesse, where Frankfurt is located, must draw up new rules regulating flights between 11 pm and 5 am. Lufthansa Cargo had warned it will lose tens of millions of dollars a year if the court backed a night flight ban at its global hub. Fraport AG, Frankfurt’s owner, hailed the decision of the Hesse administrative court as “a great day for the German air transportation industry”. The expansion program, Europe’s biggest infrastructure project, involves building a fourth runway and a third terminal and boosting Frankfurt’s annual cargo capacity by 70 per cent to around 3.2 million tonnes.