The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) reported in a release of preliminary data that U.S. airlines carried 59.6 million scheduled domestic and international passengers in April 2010. This is a 0.2 percent increase from April 2009. The April 2010 passenger total was 5.7 percent below that of two years ago in April 2008.

BTS, a part of DOT’s Research and Innovative Technology Administration, also reported that U.S. airlines carried 0.4 percent more domestic passengers in April 2010 than in April 2009.  The number of international passengers on U.S. carriers decreased 1.8 percent over April 2009. The April 2010 load factors of 81.6 percent systemwide, 82.5 percent domestic and 79.3 percent international were the highest recorded for any April.

Additional traffic numbers can be found on the BTS website in the Airline Industry box.  Click on a link in the column on the right. For more historic numbers, see Traffic on the BTS website.

For the first four months of 2010, the number of scheduled domestic and international passengers on U.S. airlines increased 0.7 percent from the same period in 2009 at 223.6 million. The number of passengers declined 9.0 percent from the first four months of 2008 to the first four months of 2010.

U.S. airlines carried 0.6 percent more domestic passengers and 1.3 percent more international passengers in the first four months of 2010 than during the same period in 2009.