Dubai Airports has announced Al Maktoum International Airport/Dubai World Central (DWC) handled 1,270,442 passengers in the first nine months of 2019.

The result means traffic has almost doubled (+99.4%) compared to the same period year-on-year.

“The high growth in year-to-date traffic is the result of the launch of temporary operations by a number of airlines during the 45-day closure of one of the two runways at Dubai International (DXB) in May-April earlier this year,” read a statement.

South Asia contributed the single largest volume of passengers (379,851) in the ninth-month period.

RUSSIA TOP DESTINATION

This was followed by CIS (313,167) and the GCC (281,184), with Eastern Europe (127,087) and Western Europe (105,906) performing strongly.

Top passenger destinations included Russia (294,145), Saudi Arabia (201,138), India (139,900) and Pakistan (107,112).

DWC welcomed 21,926 passengers in Q3. This represented a 81.6% decline year-on-year, which the airport attributes to seasonal fluctuations in traffic during the summer.

A total of 5,948 flights were recorded during the period, with the end of September tally up 28.7% to 28,078.

Dubai Airports operates DWC and DXB.