Lufthansa passenger numbers flying high in August

Lufthansa, Germany's number one airline, said Tuesday it carried 9.628 million passengers in August, 3.1 percent more than during the same month last year. Lufthansa - which also owns Austrian Airlines and SWISS - said that the number of passengers on Lufthansa-only flights rose by 4.4 percent to 6.95 million last month.
SWISS passengers were up 4.1 percent at 1.596 million, but the number of passengers flying with Austrian Airlines fell by 5.6 percent to 1.082 million. And the volume of freight transported by its Lufthansa Cargo unit slid by 8.0 percent to 137,000 tonnes, weighed down by turbulence related to the global economic slowdown, it said in a statement.
The key seat-load factor, which measures the number of seats filled on flights, increased by 2.1 percentage point to 83.8 percent for the group as a whole. Taking the eight months to August as a whole, passenger numbers grew 3.6 percent to 69.21 million for the Lufthansa group as a whole and the seat-load factor advanced by 1.2 percentage point to 79.0 percent.