Ryanair flies almost 16m in June

Ryanair flew almost 16 million passengers in June, beating its immediate pre-Covid figure for the same month by 12 per cent, figures released by the Irish airline show.

The carrier said on Monday that 15.9 million people travelled with it in June, while it sold 95 per cent of the seats available on its aircraft.

June’s total is 12 per cent more than the 14.2 million that flew with the airline during the same month in 2019, the year before Covid-19 wreaked havoc with air travel.

Ryanair’s “load factor”, that is, the proportion of seats sold, last month was still below the 97 per cent that the airline hit in June 2019.

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However, it is one of the highest that the airline has recorded since the pandemic first struck in spring 2020, while June marked the third month in a row that the load factor broke the 90 per cent mark.

Before the pandemic, Ryanair regularly sold 97 or 98 per cent of its available seats during the peak summer months.

Last month’s figure was exactly treble the 5.3 million that Ryanair flew in June 2021, when European countries were still preparing to reopen travel after 15 months of restrictions.

It brought to 134.5 million the total number of passengers flown by Ryanair over the 12 months to the end of June.

The Irish carrier, Europe’s largest, cancelled a small number of flights in June during a French air traffic control strike that added to mounting pressure on aviation over one weekend.

Ryanair and its chief executive, Michael O’Leary, have repeatedly warned of the potential for air traffic controllers’ industrial action to disrupt European travel.

While Covid curbs and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine slowed bookings earlier this year, Europeans have been taking to the air in droves since April.