Aer Lingus to add 86 new flights

Aer Lingus is to operate an additional 86 flights per week from Dublin and Cork airports - totalling an additional 15,000 extra seats in and out of Ireland.

New flights include routes from Dublin to Athens, Newcastle and Milan-Malpensa for next summer and from Cork to Manchester, Madrid and Prague. The airline will also increase the frequency of flights to a range of current European destinations.

Aer Lingus also announced a 6.4% jump in the numbers of scheduled passengers travelling with the airline today to 777,000, compared with 730,000 passengers carried in September 2005. Short-haul passengers increased by 8.9% and long-haul passengers decreased by 9.2%.

The airline, which is subject of a takeover bid by rival Ryanair, said the overall increase in passenger numbers was off-set by the terrorism alert in the UK in August which resulted in lower levels of advance passenger bookings for August, September and October.

For the nine months to September, 2006, scheduled passengers increased by 8.2% to 6,566,000 passengers carried, compared with 6,066,000 passengers carried in the same period in 2005.