American Airlines October traffic rises 5.2 pct
American Airlines says October traffic rose 5.2 percent, pushing occupancy higher, too

Wednesday November 3, 2010, 7:20 pm EDT FORT WORTH, Texas (AP)

-- American Airlines said on Wednesday that its October traffic rose 5.2 percent, as post-recession travel picked up compared with October 2009.American said it flew 10.77 billion revenue passenger miles, or one paying passenger flown one mile. That was up from 10.24 billion a year earlier.

The biggest gain was international traffic, up 11.2 percent to 4.22 billion revenue passenger miles.Capacity rose 4.6 percent to 12.89 billion available seat miles. That's what airlines like to see -- traffic rising faster than capacity.

That meant American planes were fuller. Occupancy, called load factor, rose 0.5 percent to 83.6 percent.For the first 10 months of the year, American Airlines traffic rose 2.4 percent to 105.21 billion revenue passenger miles. Capacity is up 0.7 percent to 128.05 billion available seat miles. Load factor rose 1.4 percentage points to 82.2 percent.