Passenger movements at Malta International Airport last month increased by 17.8% compared to the same month last year.

The company said that passenger movements reached 174,877, up 17.8%, when compared to the same month last year. Seat capacity for the month increased to 275,461 seats, which was a fifth more than February 2010.

The last week of February saw an extraordinary influx of traffic arrivals from Libya and an even larger amount of departing traffic on scheduled and unscheduled aircraft movements, registering a total of 5,500 passenger movements. Passenger movements by means of military and private aircraft had no impact on the results, since this traffic was excluded from official figures.

The French, Spanish and Italian markets once again grew strongly in February, by 61.4%, 51.5% and 15.2% respectively, whereas Germany and the UK grew by a more modest 8% and 6.5% respectively.

For the first two months of the year, passenger movements grew by 16.3%. aircraft movements increased by 14.8%, seat capacity increased by 15.2%, seat load factor registered a slight increase of 0.6 percentage points, MTOW increase by almost 20%, and Cargo and Mail were almost the same with a negligible increase of 0.2%

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