As with July the growth is largely attributable to comparatively lower traffic during the London Olympics last year. Underlying growth for July and August, adjusting for the Games, was 1%.
Load factors were high again whilst average aircraft size maintained its upward trend. The average number of seats per aircraft was 204.2, up 3.4%, whilst the number of passengers on each flight rose 6.9% to 168.9, resulting in an average load factor of 82.7%, up 2.6 percentage points on August 2012.
Broadly consistent with recent trends, Middle East and Central Asia traffic improved, with an increase of 13.4%. East Asia and South Asia were up 21.3% and 18.3% respectively.
BRIC economies contributed to that growth, with China up 28.3%, and India up 18.7%. Overall, traffic to the BRICS rose 13.4% on the previous year.
European traffic performance was strong, up 8.6% including growth to Italy, France and Germany.
