BOURNEMOUTH Airport earned itself a top-10 position in the league table of fastest-growing airports during 2006.

Annual figures just published by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) show Bournemouth ninth in the table, increasing its passenger numbers by 127,586 from 836,856 in 2005 to 964,442 last year - a growth of 15 per cent.

It follows the nationwide trend which shows regional airports outstripping the rate of growth of those in the London area.

"The fact that we doubled passenger figures in 2005 makes it pretty impressive to do that in 2006," said Bournemouth Airport spokesman Sally Windsor.

"Following on from Thomson Fly we saw new flights from Easyjet and Air Berlin, and we saw additional flights from Ryanair flying to Pisa, Madrid and Shannon.

"In addition to the scheduled flights, there were extra charter flights from Thomas Cook.

"Most popular routes were Glasgow and Dublin with Ryanair and, of course, the holiday hot-spots of Girona, Alicante, Malaga and Majorca."

The fastest-growing airport was Southend, which is now ranked with the CAA as a London-area airport. It grew a whopping 491 per cent. However, its passenger numbers were tiny with only 30,351 carried, an increase from 5,133 in 2005.

The percentage increase averaged out over the six London area airports - Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, London City (up 18 per cent) and Southend - was three per cent.

Ahead of Bournemouth were Southend, Derry, Doncaster, Sheffield, Blackpool, Norwich, Islay, London City and Exeter.

Cardiff and Wick were joint 10th.

Heathrow carried the most passengers (down one per cent), followed by Gatwick (up four per cent), Stansted (up eight per cent) and Manchester (a marginal increase).

Bournemouth's freight figures were down by an average of 11 per cent.

Freight carried on passenger aircraft from Bournemouth during 2006 was well down by 87 per cent from 290 tonnes to 38 tonnes. The amount carried on specialist cargo aircraft was down seven per cent from 5,429 tonnes in 2005 to 5,030 tonnes.

Sally Windsor said: "We don't have a huge freight operation anyway. It's not really a significant part of our business, we are mainly passenger flights."