More than 788,000 passengers flew via airports in the North of Scotland in the past 10 months.

Passenger figures for January 2004 issued by HIAL today (18 February) show that 788,396 travellers used the company’s 10 airports in the 10 months to end of January. This is an increase of more than 56,000 passengers on the previous year’s running total.

Overall passenger growth for the first 10 months of 2003/04 is 7.7% compared to 2002/03, with seven out of the company’s 10 airports recording growth against last year’s performance.

In January, 61,645 passengers used HIAL airports; a 9.2% increase on January 2003’s figure of 56,442.

Inverness and Stornoway continue to be the fastest developing airports in the region with respective passenger growth for the year to date of 18.5% and 12.1%. Barra, Benbecula, Campbeltown, Islay and Kirkwall also recorded growth in passengers.

Wick and Tiree saw small drops in overall passengers for the 10 month period while Sumburgh’s figures continued to reflect the downturn in oil industry traffic.

Total aircraft movements, including scheduled, charter, executive, general aviation and military flights have also grown, up 7.3% to 68,721 for the 10 months compared with an annual total for 2002/03 of 76,119.

Bob Macleod, Managing Director of HIAL, said: “Passenger figures in the region continue to grow and we are confident that this trend will continue into the next operating year with the addition of bmi’s Heathrow-Inverness and Snowflake’s Stockholm-Inverness services.”

HIAL Passenger Figures for 2003/2004 (April-January)

HIAL January 2004 Passenger Figures

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