Budget airlines Ryanair and Wizz Air have both reported a jump in February carryings.
The Irish group saw passenger numbers rise by 13% year-on-year to 9.6 million passengers across Ryanair and Austrian subsidiary Laudamotion.
Ryanair made up the lion’s share of carryings, up 9% to 9.3 million passengers with a load factor of 96%, while Laudamotion flew 300,000.
This gave a rolling annual total up 9% to 141.2 million passengers.
Ryanair operated more than 53,000 flights in the month with over 93% arriving on time, excluding air traffic control delays.
Wizz Air’s passenger numbers rose by almost 13% in February to hit the 2.4 million mark.
The increase over the same month last year came with an improved load factor, up three percentage points to 94.2%.
The result gave the Hungarian low cost carrier a rolling annual total of 34.3 million passengers, a rise of 17.8%.
The airline took delivery of two new Airbus A321s in the month, taking its fleet up to 108 aircraft.
This contributed to a 9.3% rise in capacity to more than 2.5 million seats over February 2018 across its network of more than 650 routes from 26 bases.
