Strong month for BAA despite 35% drop in Asian traffic

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BAA's UK airports handled a total of 10.9m passengers in May, a 2% increase from the same month last year.

BAA's UK airports handled a total of 10.9m passengers in May, a 2% increase from the same month last year. While European scheduled flights performed strongly, with a 7.2% increase, the authority reported that SARS had badly affected long-haul Asian flights, which fell 35% from last year's figures.

Heathrow airport was badly affected by the fall in long-haul passengers, but Gatwick, and Stansted both saw encouraging increases with the latter's passenger numbers increasing by 16.6%. More good news came thanks to a quick recovery on Middle East routes after the end of hostilities in Iraq. Overall, the authority said there had been "no significant dip overall in traffic at BAA airports as a result of the Middle East conflict and the SARS epidemic".