OREANDA-NEWS. Heathrow saw 6.9 million passengers in July, a 5.5% increase on July 2012. The growth is largely attributable to lower traffic in July last year as a result of the timing of the London Olympics.

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%).

Cargo volumes continued to fall, with a drop of 6%.

Alongside winning the Executive Travel magazine's Leading-Edge Award for 'Best International Airport', in July Heathrow also submitted three options to the Airports Commission for solving the lack of hub airport capacity in the UK. These would see a third runway placed to the north, north west or south west of the existing airport.

Chief Executive for Heathrow, Colin Matthews, said: “Our passenger figures underline the UK's urgent need for a single hub airport with the capacity to meet the demand for links to emerging economies. The best solution for taxpayers, passengers and business is to build on the strength we already have at Heathrow.”