Air passengers fall amid downturn

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And the decline was particularly sharp in the final part of 2008 as the credit crunch started to bite, the figures from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) showed.

UK airports handled 235 million passengers in 2008 - a 1.9% fall on the 2007 figure and only the fourth time since the end of the Second World War that there has been a year-on-year decline.

There were four million fewer passengers passing through the airports in October-December 2008 than in the same period of the previous year.

As economic gloom descended, passenger numbers dipped 8.9% in November 2008 compared with November 2007, and fell 7.9% in December 2008 compared with the same month in the previous year.

At the London airports - Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and London City - the annual fall last year was 2%, with 1.4 million fewer passengers using Stansted - a 6% decline on the 2007 total.

Luton, though, handled 2.6% more passengers, while there was a 12% rise in the number of passengers passing through London City airport.

At the regional airports - those other than the London airports - passenger numbers fell 1.8% to 98 million. Manchester, the largest regional airport, saw passenger numbers fall by 3.8%, but Birmingham airport grew by 4.8%.

In 2008, a total 25 million passengers took domestic flights, which represented a fall of 4.8% on 2007.

The CAA said this is a trend that has been apparent for a number of years and has been driven in part by greater competition with domestic rail services.