Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, will begin services from its Abu Dhabi home base to Cape Town on September 30 this year.

The new Cape Town flights will operate via Etihad's current daily, Airbus A330, service to Johannesburg. It will be Etihad's second destination in South Africa and its fifth on the African continent, joining Khartoum, Cairo and Casablanca.

And talking Etihad, the airline had its busiest month ever in July with more than 616 000 passengers flying. That's a nine percent increase on passenger numbers for July 2008. While so many airlines are struggling, it's good to see there are some that are beating the downward trend.

The highlight of the month was Friday, July 31, when a record 21 640 passengers, with a load factor of 90.3 percent, flew making it the airline's busiest day in its five-year history. The last week of July saw an average of more than 20 500 passengers fly aboard its planes each day.