BAA air traffic climbs 7.7%

The British Airports Authority today said an early Easter helped it notch up a 7.7% rise in traffic at its airports last month.

The group, which owns Heathrow, Stansted and Gatwick Airports, said it handled 11.6 million passengers in March.

After stripping out the effect of the bank holiday weekend, BAA said the increase was 5% – still higher than February’s 4.6% gain. For the year to March as a whole, the group’s UK airports handled 141.7 million passengers, up 6.3% against the previous financial year.

Gatwick was the main winner from the early Easter, with traffic rising by 15.4%. Passenger numbers through the Sussex airport topped 32 million during the financial year, the first time numbers have exceeded 32 million since September 2001.

Heathrow was 5.2% up on the same month a year earlier, while Stansted increased by 9.1%.