Air New Zealand carried 1.18 million passengers last month, down 1.2 per cent on September 2008, the airline's latest update shows.
The September performance takes the number of passengers for the financial year-to-date to 3.22 million, an adjusted fall of 4.3 per cent from a year earlier.
Demand, as measured in revenue passenger kilometres, was down 6.8 per cent in the month and 10.2 per cent for the financial year so far.
Capacity, measured in available seat kilometres, fell 11.9 per cent in the month and was down 11.5 per cent year-to-date.
Passenger load factor lifted 4.5 percentage points in September to 82.3 per cent.
On short haul routes, passenger numbers were up 0.5 per cent last month compared to September last year, while on long haul routes numbers were down 10.7 per cent to 158,000.
Domestic routes were the only ones to record a rise in demand, with revenue passenger kilometres up 3.8 per cent in September from a year ago, while the number of domestic passengers rose 1.5 per cent compared to a year ago to 764,000.
Air NZ said a 13.1 per cent fall in capacity on Tasman/Pacific routes was mainly due to the use of smaller aircraft and the withdrawal of trans-Tasman flights from Hamilton and Dunedin. Load factor increased by 8.6 percentage points to 80.2 per cent.
Group-wide yields for the financial year to date were down 10.3 per cent on the same period last year, Air NZ said.
Year-to-date short haul yields were down 11.6 per cent and long haul yields were down by 12.3 per cent. Removing the impact of foreign exchange, group-wide yields were down 13.2 per cent.
© 2009 AAP
