LAN Airlines S.A. and its subsidiaries, one of the leading airlines in Latin America, reported its preliminary monthly traffic statistics and punctuality indicators for February 2010. System passenger traffic for February increased 9.6% as capacity rose 7.1%. As a result, the company’s load factor increased 1.9 points to 81.9%. International passenger traffic accounted for approximately 69% of totalpassenger traffic. These figures consider flight cancellations on February 27th and February 28th due to the shutdown of the Santiago International Airport as a result of the earthquake that affected Chile on February 27, 2010.
Domestic passenger traffic in Chile, Argentina, Peru and Ecuador rose 7.9% as capacity increased 1.5%. As a consequence, the domestic load factor for the month increased 5.0 points to 83.1%. International passenger traffic for February rose 10.4% as capacity increased 9.7%. Accordingly, the international passenger load factor for the month increased 0.5 points to 81.4%. International capacity was mainly driven by an increase in operations on routes to the United States and Europe.
During the month of February, cargo traffic increased 31.4%. This increase was mainly due to the recovery in imports in to Latin America driven by Brazil, as well as increased operations to Europe with the B777-200 freighter fleet. In-line with the higher demand, capacity grew 25.7%. As a result, the cargo load factor rose 3.0 points to 68.1%.
During February, 83.8% of the company’s total flights left on time based on a fifteen-minute standard (all departures leaving within fifteen minutes of the scheduled departure time are considered as “on-time”). This represented a decrease of 7.6 points compared to February 2009. Punctuality figures exclude operations on February 27th and 28th in Santiago when the Santiago International Airport was closed.