BAA?s seven UK airports handled a total of 10.7m passengers in December 2005, a rise of 2.0% on December 2004 and taking the accumulated calendar year total to 144.3m, an increase of 3.0%.

In a statement BAA said there were mixed results among the key market segments with North Atlantic traffic down by 1.7%, while other long-haul routes recorded a collective gain of 7.4%. European scheduled traffic was up by 3.7%, but BAA added that the smaller European charter market was 16.4% lower than in December 2004 as some of the charter airlines continued the trend of diversifying intoscheduled flying.
Traffic on Irish routes, helped by new low-cost services, rose by 7.5%, while UK domestic routes saw a drop of 0.5%. Among individual airports the fastest growing was Southampton, with an 18.6% increase in December. Elsewhere in the South East, Stansted grew by 4.8% and Gatwick by 2.5%.
Heathrow was unchanged. In Scotland Aberdeen was 10.4% up on December 2004 and there were gains of 3.5% and 1.9% at Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively.
BAA concluded: ‘For the financial year to date, traffic at BAA?s seven UK airports is running 2.4% higher than in the same period of the previous year. BAA now expects the total for the full financial year to the end of March to be around 2.5%, rather than the approximately 3 per cent estimated at the time of the company?s interim results onNovember 1.’