BAA reports 0.8% February traffic rise

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The UK airports post slight growth, citing last February's extra day as a limiting factor

BAA's UK airports handled 9.6m passengers in February, a rise of 0.8% compared with the same period last year. However, the company claimed the figures have been distorted by an additional leap year day in 2004, the equivalent of which this year would have pushed the increase to 4.8%.

Excluding the extra day in 2004, the strongest growth was reported on 'other' long haul routes where traffic increased by 9.5% while North Atlantic markets grew by 5.1%. Low-cost carriers benefited Irish and European scheduled routes with Irish traffic growing 8.6% and European scheduled traffic rising 5.4%. Domestic traffic grew 1.3% while European charter traffic continued to decline, falling 4.4% against the previous year.

On a like-for-like basis, Heathrow was up 3.3% and Gatwick increase by 9.5%. Stansted rose by 4% and Southampton by 2.2% In Scotland overall results showed strong scheduled traffic offset weak charter markets to give an overall increase of 4.3%.