AITAL Member Airline Traffic for September Shows 13.1% Growth.

MIAMI -- AITAL, the Latin American International Air Transport Association, has issued its first Member Airline Traffic Report for the Latin American region, showing that capacity, measured in Available Seat Kilometers (ASKs), rose 8.2% for the September 2004 period, while traffic, measured in Revenue Passenger Kilometers (RPKs), increased 13.1%. Since traffic grew faster than capacity, the amount of seats filled - the load factor - increased 2.9 percentage points to 68.3% for the month.

Latin American airlines carried 5.5 million passengers during the slower month of September, an increase of 11.9% over the year-earlier period. Capacity grew greatest within the region (+15.2% year over year), followed by capacity to North America (+11.6%) and Europe (+8.7%). Charter capacity grew 24.5% year over year.

Freight Ton Kilometers (FTK) by passenger carriers grew 12.6% to 170,429 tons, while ton kilometers by all-cargo operations (FTKF) rose 5.1% during the month to 112,334. Of all freight carried by Latin American airlines, 27% is carried intra-LatAm, while the remaining 73% is international (outside the region). Forty-five percent of ton kilometers is transported to North America, while 26% is carried to the EU.

AITAL will issue these statistics each month and further details and charts for this report are available on our web site, http://www.aital.org. If you wish to download the file go to http://www.aital.org/descargas/informe_200409_en.pdf.

During the first nine months of 2004, AITAL member airlines carried 50 million passengers, up 8.7%, with international passenger growth showing a stronger 9.3% increase, and domestic passengers grew 7.2%. Capacity during the nine month period, measured in ASKs, rose 6.1% to 117 billion, on 11.5% greater passenger traffic (80.3 billion RPKs), which pushed load factor up 3.4 percentage points to 68.6%.

AITAL, http://www.aital.org, was founded in 1980 as a non-profit organization and currently members 21 airlines in Latin America. Its member carriers have total revenue of more than $12 billion, operate more than 550 aircraft and employ 65,000 workers in Mexico, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and in other nations the airlines serve.