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Etihad Airways has enjoyed its busiest month
ever with more than 616,000 passengers flying onboard the Abu
Dhabi-based airline’s flights during July, a 9% increase on
passenger numbers for July 2008.
The highlight of the month was Friday 31 July
when a record 21,640 passengers, with a load factor of 90.3%, flew
with Etihad making it the airline’s busiest day in its five year
history. The last week of July saw an average of more than 20,500
passengers fly aboard its planes each day.
The
month of July 2009 saw Etihad’s 900 weekly flights – a 20% increase on the number of weekly flights operated in July 2008 –
fly at an average of 88% full across first, business and
economy cabins.
James Hogan, Etihad Airways’ chief
executive, said, “The record-breaking passenger numbers we have
experienced in July demonstrate that, despite the current economic
challenges, Etihad continues to attract high volumes of traffic
across all three cabins on our global network of more than 50
destinations.
“Whilst we expected July to be busy
we are delighted to have beaten our previous records, especially
during the final week of the month when we carried more than
20,500 passengers each day. We now look forward to building upon
this for the remainder of the summer holiday period and into the
Holy Month of Ramadan.”
Etihad Airwys’s flights to the
Asia Pacific region and also North America turned in
particularly strong performances during July 2009 with seat factors
averaging more than 86%. Within Europe, loads exceeded 82%and in the Middle East region it was 77%.
Etihad introduced three new destinations in June – Larnaca
in Cyprus, the Greek capital of Athens and Istanbul, Turkey’s
commercial capital – which all made an impact in July’s successful
passenger numbers.
Etihad also continues to expand
its flight network and will launch non-stop flights from its Abu
Dhabi base to Chicago in September as well as the South African
city of Cape Town.
In addition to the record
passenger numbers, Etihad also enjoyed its best July for on-time
performance at Abu Dhabi airport with 90% of flights
departing within 15 minutes of the scheduled time.
This represents an improvement of five percentage points on
the same period in 2008, despite a 21%increase in the
airline’s flying schedule.
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July 2009
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