Australian airline Qantas Airways Ltd
(ASX:QAN) says group passenger numbers for August increased 6 per cent over the previous year.
The Qantas group includes; Qantas Domestic, QantasLink, Jetstar Domestic, Qantas International and Jetstar International.
The airline says group Revenue Passenger Kilometres, a measure of sales volume of passengers, fell 1.4 per cent.
Available Seat Kilometres, a measure of flights scheduled and seats available for the month, dropped 4.8 per cent.
Revenue seat factor of 80.5 per cent was 2.8 percentage points higher than the year before.
Qantas says Group passenger numbers for the financial year to August 2009 rose 5.2 per cent from the previous year.
The company says total domestic yield for the financial year to August 2009 was 12.8 per cent lower than last year, while international yield decreased by 22.9 per cent compared to the same period last year.
In an update on hedging , Qantas says it hedged 81 per cent of its expected fuel requirement in 2009/2010 at a worst-case crude oil price of US$89 a barrel.
Qantas says it has 74 per cent participation in falling oil prices for the remainder of the year.
Qantas recorded net profit of $117 million for 2009 a massive drop from its high of close to one billion dollars in 2008.
