Heathrow saw 6.9 million passengers in July 2013, a 5.5% increase

Heathrow Airport saw 6.9 million passengers in July, a 5.5% increase on July 2012. Load factors continued to be high at the same time as average aircraft size maintained its recent upward trend. The average number of seats per aircraft was 203.5, up 2.9%. However, the average number of passengers on each flight rose 5% to 168.5, pushing load factors to 82.8%, up 1.7 percentage points on July 2012. On a regional basis, East Asia traffic saw the biggest rise, up 18.9%, largely as a result of increases in capacity. Latin America was up by 5.9% in total, with most of the growth coming from additional capacity on services to Mexico. European traffic continued to see the effects of BA’s integration with BMI, up 8.9%, including growth in Italy (21.1%), France (17.4%), Norway (17.4%) and Germany (16.4%). Traffic to and from the BRIC economies was up 8.7%, with notable growth for China (22.2%) and India (10.8%).