United Airlines Traffic Rose 1.8% in November

United Airlines said Thursday that its traffic rose 1.8 percent in November. That plus a smaller fleet added up to planes that were 80.2 percent full.

Travel has generally been in decline this year, so airlines have been cutting capacity to avoid flying empty seats around.

But November traffic at United rose to 8.63 billion revenue passenger miles across its system, including regional flights, compared with November 2008. A revenue passenger mile equals one paying passenger flown one mile. United cut capacity 2.7 percent to 10.75 billion available seat miles.

Traffic in North America was down just 1 percent. United’s Pacific traffic rose 0.5 percent and traffic across the Atlantic rose 2.6 percent. Traffic to Latin America — a much smaller market for United to begin with — fell 16.3 percent.

For the first 11 months of the year, United traffic fell 7.1 percent, while it cut capacity 7.8 percent.

Shares of United parent UAL Corp. fell 7 cents to close at $9.22 on Thursday.

12/3/2009 6:44 PM CHICAGO (AP)