Cathay, Dragonair cargo volume up 12pc in November

HONG KONG's Cathay Pacific and sister airline Dragonair combined carried 165,102 tonnes of cargo and mail in November, an increase of 12 per cent compared to the same month last year.

The cargo and mail load factor rose by 4.7 percentage points to 68.4 per cent. Capacity, measured in available cargo/mail tonne kilometres, was up 5.3 per cent while cargo and mail revenue tonne kilometres (RTKs) flown surged by 13.1 per cent.

For the year to the end of November, tonnage rose by 11.9 per cent while capacity was up 10.7 per cent and RTKs increased by 14.8 per cent on-year.

Cathay Pacific general manager cargo sales Mark Sutch said: "The demand for air cargo shipments remained very robust throughout November, again driven primarily by strong traffic on the transpacific lanes.

"Our business was helped by the bottlenecks in seaports on the west coast of the USA, leading to more shipments being moved by air.

"Intra-Asian traffic remained robust in November, and it was a better month for our cargo business in Europe, helped by big shipments of the new release Beaujolais out of France. We carried close to 2,000 tonnes of the wine in total, most of it bound for Japan," he said.

Together the sister airlines carried a total of 2,569,508 passengers in November, an increase of 3.7 per cent compared to the same month in 2013. The passenger load factor fell by 0.9 percentage points to 80.4 per cent while capacity, measured in available seat kilometres (ASKs), rose by five per cent.