Ryanair's February passenger numbers up 5 pct year-on-year

DUBLIN, March 5 (Xinhua) -- Ryanair announced on Monday that its February passenger numbers went up 5 percent to 8.6 million compared with the same month last year.

In a brief statement released on its website, the Ireland-headquartered airline said that the total number of its passengers carried in the 12 months up to February stood at 130 million people, up 9 percent compared with the previous period.

The load factor or the occupancy rate of each flight of the company remained unchanged at a strong rate of 95 percent when compared with a year ago, said Ryanair in the statement.

Both Ryanair's traffic volume and growth rate in February went down moderately while compared with the January figures which stood at 9.3 million and 6 percent respectively.

The airline did not explain the reasons for these, but the fact that February is shorter than January in terms of its actual number of days could be a factor.

Last year Ryanair carried a total of 129 million passengers, one million less than that of Germany's Lufthansa, which resulted in a loss of its ranking as the largest airline in Europe.

Ryanair's drop to the second largest airline in Europe in 2017 was largely due to the fact that over 20,000 flights of the airline were cancelled because of the strikes by its pilots across Europe. Enditem