Lufthansa, Germany's number one airline, said Thursday, August 9 that it carried 10.15 million passengers in July, 2.1 percent more than during the same month last year, AFP reported.

Lufthansa -- which also owns Austrian Airlines and SWISS -- said that the number of passengers on Lufthansa only flights rose by 3.6 percent to 7.4 million last month.

SWISS passenger numbers were up 1.2 percent at 1.64 million, but the number of passengers flying with Austrian Airlines fell by 5.6 percent to 1.115 million.

And the volume of freight transported by its Lufthansa Cargo unit slid by 10.5 percent to 144,000 tonnes, weighed down by turbulence related to the global economic slowdown, it said in a statement.

The key seat-load factor, which measures the number of seats filled on flights, increased by 0.8 percentage point to 84.9 percent for the group as a whole.

Looking at the the seven months to July, passenger numbers grew 3.6 percent to 59.55 million for the entire Lufthansa group, while the seat-load factor advanced by 1.0 percentage point to 78.2 percent.