Airline blames swine flu

Air New Zealand is blaming swine flu for a 24.7 per cent fall in passenger numbers on its Asia/Japan/Britain routes in June, compared to a year ago.

The airline carried 1.1 million passengers last month, down 5.5 per cent on June 2008. But with its capacity down 12.3 per cent, its passenger load factor rose 2 percentage points to 79.5 per cent.

For all long-haul routes passenger numbers were down 14 per cent to 148,000, while the load factor rose 1.2 points to 82 per cent.

Even on the hard-hit Asian routes, the load factor lifted 0.5 points to 78.8 per cent as capacity fell 23.6 per cent.