Lufthansa, Germany's number one airline, said Tuesday that its passenger numbers fell in November. A Lufthansa statement said the airline group carried 7.691 million passengers last month, 1.3 percent fewer than in November 2011. Lufthansa - which also owns Austrian Airlines and SWISS - said the number of passengers on Lufthansa-only flights fell by 2.1 percent to 5.583 million last month.

SWISS passengers were down 0.2 percent at 1.245 million, but the number of passengers flying with Austrian Airlines increased by 2.3 percent to 863,000. And the volume of freight transported by its Lufthansa Cargo unit slid by 2.4 percent to 152,000 tonnes, weighed down by turbulence related to the global economic slowdown, it said. Because, however, Lufthansa cut capacity last month, the key seat-load factor, which measures the number of seats filled on flights, increased by 1.4 percentage point to 75.5 percent for the group as a whole.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2012