Pandy,
Re LH to FRA, the May stats have now been published and show 9441 used the route last month. If all rotations operated this would give an average load of 51, which represents a load factor in the low 50s% on the Eurowings 146-300.
It appears that the route is building steadily but it does not seem to have been helped by the pricing anomalies. Had the airline used one of their 50-seat CRJs, which was something that a number of people suggested would be the better course, clearly they could not have accommodated all the people who travelled in May.
The other new 'legacy carrier' (SAS) route to Oslo saw 1858 passengers in May, an average load of 72, down from April's average of 78. I'm not sure of the seating capacity of the 737s used (they don't always use the same model variant as far as I can tell) but I would have thought the load factor cannot be any higher than 60% at best.
Ryanair and easyJet continue to slug it out over Milan with neither getting spectacular loads. FR saw 6929 to Bergamo (average load 112, load factor 59%) and easyJet saw 6427 to Malpensa (average load 104, load factor 66%).
It will be interesting to see how long they keep this up. Ryanair have certainly indicated through their winter timetable that they intend continuing daily; we shall have to wait for easy's decision when their winter timetable is published.
Not all doom and gloom though with load factors on FR's Polish routes significantly up on previous months with some well into the 80s% - easy getting similar lfs on their Warsaw and Krakow.
Overall BRS handled 588,705 passengers in May, up 14.3% on May 2007, and the rolling 12-month total is 6,166,818, up 8.3% on the same period last year.