A total of 4,877,212 passengers traveled through Denver International Airport in August, an increase of 2.3 percent over the 4,768,799 travelers who used the airport during the same month last year. It was DIA’s busiest August on record, marking two straight months of growth after a downward trend that started in December 2008.

“A record July followed by a record August is a very positive sign,” DIA Aviation Manager Kim Day said Wednesday. “While it is still likely that we will finish the year down slightly from our record year of 2008, passenger traffic is better than we had predicted, and we believe that’s a direct result of the strong competition in the Denver market.”

For the first eight months of the year, passenger traffic at DIA totaled 34,324,108. That was down 2.8 percent from the 35,320,524 passengers recorded during the same period in 2008. DIA’s record of 51.2 million passengers was set last year.

Flight operations in August totaled 55,202, a decline of only 0.8 percent from the same month last year. For the first eight months of the year, DIA’s operations totaled 413,306, down 3.3 percent from the comparable period of 2008.