The UK’s third and fourth biggest airports both followed a strong summer with more growth in October.
Stansted has now beaten its pre-recession passenger record set in 2007, having handled 24.1m in the past year.
Stansted claims to be continuing to take advantage of other airport runways in the south-east now operating at full capacity.
London’s third airport has the runway capacity available to handle another 20 million passengers a year and owner Manchester Airports Group has called on government to invest in better rail links to make full use of Stansted’s capacity and enable the airport to become more attractive to airlines and passengers.
Manchester airport achieved 11.8% year-on-year growth last month to 2.3 million passengers, with Stansted’s numbers up by 6% to 2.1 million.
Mag’s third largest UK airport, East Midlands, saw a 5.9% increase to 463,653 passengers while Bournemouth numbers fell 13.6% to 69,100.
This gave Mag total passenger throughput of more than five million passengers in October and a rolling annual total of 54.6 million.