OREANDA-NEWS. Heathrow saw 6.5 million passengers in June, a 4.6% increase on June 2012. June 2013 saw some recovery of traffic due to the extra Jubilee Bank Holiday last year, which was only partially offset by the French ATC dispute disrupting operations on the 11th and 12th. Adjusting for these effects would result in an underlying increase of 3.6% on June 2012.

June’s total brings the number of passengers travelling through Heathrow in the first six months of 2013 to more than 34 million, a 2.4% increase over the same period last year.

Passengers per flight, load factor and seats per aircraft were all strong. The average number of passengers on each flight rose to 164.2, pushing load factors to 81%, up 0.7 percentage points on June 2012. The average number of seats per aircraft was up 2.8% to 202.7.

European traffic increased by 6.6%, including double digit growth in Italy (18.7%), Norway (21.5%), France (13.7%) and the Netherlands (11.7%). East Asia and South America saw increases of 11.6% and 12.9% respectively. Traffic to and from the BRIC economies was up 8.7%, with material growth for China (24.6%) and India (8.7%).

Cargo volumes fell, with a drop of 4.2% in June.

June also saw Heathrow announce that the new Terminal 2 will be named Terminal 2: The Queen’s Terminal, and will open its doors on June 4th 2014. The terminal represents a GBP 2.5 billion private sector investment in infrastructure and will have supported 35,000 jobs across the country by the time it is operational.

Chief Executive for Heathrow, Colin Matthews, said:

“Terminal 2 represents the latest chapter in Heathrow’s on-going transformation following GBP 11 billion of investment since 2003. We want to continue to invest in improving the passenger experience, but the CAA’s initial price cap proposals put that in doubt. International shareholders will only invest if the return is fair and competitive with other opportunities around the world. ”