Stansted airport today reached another landmark in its rapid development after figures showed it had handled 20 million passengers in a year for the first time.
The Essex site, the UK's fourth-biggest airport, reached the milestone after numbers in May rose by almost 7% compared to a year ago, reaching 1.7 million passengers.
The boom in low-cost air travel has underpinned the rapid expansion of Stansted, which handled just 7.4 million passengers during the 1998/99 financial year.
BAA, which owns Stansted and six other UK airports, also said that annual passenger numbers at Heathrow had passed 65 million for the first time.
Heathrow has seen a strong recovery from its depressed figures last year, with numbers for May up 12.4% to 5.5 million.
BAA also reported growth at Gatwick - up 2.9% in the month to 2.6m passengers - and Southampton, where strong recent growth continued with a 24.8% leap in figures for May, bringing them to almost 130,000.
Overall, BAA said it had handled 11.7 million passengers in May, an increase of 7.8% on a year ago.
Among key markets, BAA reported strong growth across the airports in European scheduled traffic, while North Atlantic business grew 18.1% because of the strong recovery at Heathrow, Gatwick and Glasgow.
The only significant market weakness was in European charter traffic, which dipped 13.3% compared to last year, although this may have been attributable to the slightly later spring half-term holiday.
The aviation sector is starting to recover from the slump that has affected it in recent years, when it suffered from the effects of the September 11 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, a global economic slowdown and the outbreak of the Sars virus in Asia.
