Over three million passengers travelled through Heathrow during October, delivering a sixth consecutive month of growth at the airport.

Relaxation of travel rules ahead of half-term unleashed pent up demand, the airport said, with close to 100,000 travellers a day using the terminals.

This is up 144 per cent compared with the same time last year.

However, numbers totalled just 15 million in the year to October, down 54 per cent on the already depressed figure for the year to October 2020.

Heathrow chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, said: “As the journey to recovery accelerates, aviation’s ambitions to decarbonise must keep pace.

“We need to keep our foot to the pedal, working to make air travel guilt-free and government must act with a mandate for ten per cent sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2030 and a price stability mechanism to upscale SAF usage, if we are to tackle the industry’s biggest challenge – carbon.”