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.

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

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.

Cathay Pacific general manager revenue management Patricia Hwang said: “The growth in passenger traffic was again below expectations in November. Unlike in the previous month, we believe some of the shortfall was attributable to the protests taking place in Hong Kong. The overall trends were similar to October, with weaker-than-expected demand in the premium cabins and the growth in traffic on North America routes falling well short of the big increase in capacity. The positive areas were North Asia, with traffic to Japan boosted by the depreciation of the yen, and continuing strong demand to and from Europe and Australia/New Zealand.”