Tokyo Narita’s traffic recovery hits swine flu setback

Tokyo's main international gateway, Narita Airport, was showing some tentative signs of recovery (particularly in the all-important outbound segment) last month, with provisional traffic results for April showing that international passenger traffic was down by (just) 4% to 2.46 million passengers. Japanese international passenger numbers fell by 3%, or by 37,000 travelers, to 1.24 million (boosted by the 'Golden Week' holidays from 28-Apr-09 to 06-May-09), while non-Japanese international passenger traffic was down 10% to 753,089, a fall of 81,000 travelers. Total volumes had fallen as much as 12% year-on-year in Feb-2009.