Ryanair carries 10m passengers in March

The number of passengers carried by Ryanair in March reached 10 million, up 6 percent compared with the same period last year, said the airline on Wednesday.

In a statement released on its website, the Ireland-headquartered airline said that the company's load factor or the occupancy rate of its flight in the month also went up 1 percentage point to 95 percent compared with a year ago.

During the first three months of this year, Ryanair carried a total number of 27.9 million passengers, 1.5 million more or 5.68 percent up compared with the same period last year, according to the statistics released by the company.

The statistics showed that the monthly growth rate of Ryanair's traffic in the January-March period of this year averaged 5.66 percent.

Last year, Ryanair lost its position as Europe's largest airline to Germany's Lufthansa by flying one million less passengers than the latter which carried a total of 130 million passengers.

Ryanair's drop to the second largest airline in Europe in 2017 was largely due to the fact that over 20,000 flights of the airline were cancelled because of the strikes by its pilots across Europe.

Just a few days prior to last year's Christmas, Ryanair avoided another massive strike by recognizing the trade union of its pilots in Ireland for the first time in its 32-year history.