Singapore Airlines has posted a freight tonne kilometre growth of 3.1 per cent, surpassing its overall capacity growth of 2.1 per cent, reports Air Cargo Asia Pacific.

Cargo load factor growth was kept to 0.6 percentage points and the slight increase in volume was attributed to higher tonnage carried in Europe and West Asia and Africa regions.

But as the tonnage increase failed to match gains in capacity, the cargo load factor fell. The southwest Pacific region scored the highest cargo load factor growth rate on rising volumes together with a corresponding drop in capacity.

Passenger volume continued strong. In June, SIA achieved a 1.7 per cent year-on-year growth in system-wide passenger carriage (in revenue passenger kilometres) while capacity (measured in available seat kilometres) was reduced by 1.4 per cent.

This led to an overall improvement in passenger load factor of 2.5 per cent to 82.4 per cent. The number of passengers carried increased by 3.9 per cent over the same month last year to 1.57 million.

All route regions showed improvement in passenger load factors over the same month last year, with the Americas, Europe and south west Pacific regions registering load factors of 80 per cent. The Americas region achieved the highest load factors at 90.1 per cent.