BAA has issued figures that show, allowing for the fact that 2004 was a leap year with an extra day, a steady growth in airline traffic overall for its seven airports. Stripped of the extra day, the underlying increase for February 2005 is 4.8% and 9m passengers. Stansted now seems to be expanding at the average rate rather than with the huge increases of last year, and likewise Southampton. North Atlantic markets added 5.1%. Low cost travel continued to benefit Irish and European scheduled routes with Irish traffic growing 8.6% and European scheduled traffic rising 5.4%. Domestic traffic grew 1.3% while European charter traffic continued to decline, falling 4.4% against the previous year.
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