Continental June traffic up 4.7%, capacity up 2.2%

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Continental Airlines said late Thursday traffic in June rose 4.7% to 8.44 billion revenue passenger miles from 8.07 billion revenue miles in June 2009. A revenue passenger mile is equal to one passenger flown one mile. Total capacity last month increased to 2.2% to 9.72 billion available seat miles from 9.51 billion a year earlier. Load factor, or the percentage of available seats filled with passengers, climbed 2.1 percentage points to 86.9% last month. Continental also estimated that passenger revenue per available seat mile rose between 21% to 22% from June last year.