Pinnacle Airlines says August traffic fell 3.5 pct

Regional airline operator Pinnacle Airlines Corp. said its August traffic fell 3.5 percent.

Pinnacle, which hauls passengers under contract for big-name carriers, said on Tuesday it flew almost 408.7 million revenue passenger miles in August, or one paying passenger flown one mile. That’s down from 423.7 million revenue passenger miles flown in August 2009.

Pinnacle shrank its capacity by 5.9 percent to 510.9 million available seat miles, from 543.1 million a year ago. That meant that its planes were actually a little more crowded, with occupancy rising to 80 percent, up by 2 percentage points from a year ago.

For the first eight months of the year, Pinnacle traffic fell 3.2 percent to 3.15 billion revenue passenger miles. Capacity fell 0.8 percent to 4.17 billion available seat miles. Occupancy, which the airlines call load factor, fell 1.8 percentage points to 75.4 percent.