On Tuesday Alaska Air Group announced that its traffic rose 15.9 percent at Alaska Airlines, enough to push the occupancy on its planes.

The airline reported flying 1.69 billion revenue passenger miles for October, an increase from almost 1.46 billion revenue passenger miles a year earlier.

A revenue passenger mile is one paying passenger flown one mile. Capacity increased 9.1 percent to 2.07 billion available seat miles, from 1.89 billion a year earlier.

With traffic increasing faster than capacity more seats were filled. Load factor increased 4.8 percentage points to 81.8 percent.

The first 10 months of the year, Alaska Airlines traffic is up 10.1 percent to 16.82 billion revenue passenger miles. Capacity rose 4.6 percent to 20.26 billion available seat miles. Load factor was up 4.1 percentage points to 83 percent.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek