LONDON -- Boeing Co. 747 jumbo jets are being brought out of desert storage as surging bookings spur carriers including British Airways Plc and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd. to return their biggest planes to traffic.

British Airways will recall a 747-400 for flights to Dallas in its winter schedule starting in October, freeing a Boeing 777 for an extra New York trip, and Cathay Pacific has reinstated five freighters. United Airlines took a jumbo out of storage in California in June for use as a spare during the summer months.

Wide-body planes accounted for about 25 percent of the 200 aircraft retrieved from storage in May and June as carriers sought to tap rising demand for long-haul trips and a leap in cargo shipments. The number of 747s recalled in June exceeded those mothballed for the first time since January 2009, data compiled by aviation consultant Ascend Worldwide Ltd. shows.

“Everybody is getting very excited about passenger and cargo volumes coming back, but there’s a great temptation to add too much capacity,” said Chris Tarry, an independent airline analyst and strategy consultant in London who has followed the industry for almost three decades. “What may be rational fleet decisions for individual airlines can add up to a problem for the industry when taken together.”

London-based British Airways is lifting winter capacity about 7 percent from a year earlier but will only add seats where it can do so without depressing yields, a measure of prices, spokesman Euan Fordyce said by telephone.

The deployment of the 747 to Dallas will provide about 70 more seats per flight, while the transfer of the 777 will take the number of services to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to seven a day from six, he said.

British Airways has learned a lesson from the 1990s, when it brought back “chunks” of capacity too quickly, Treasurer George Stinnes said in June. Europe’s third-largest airline still has seven 747s in storage, together with other models.

Of the 112 jumbos mothballed since the start of last year, 40 are still in storage, according to figures from Ascend.

The United Airlines 747, with about 370 seats in a three- class layout, has operated on domestic flights between the carrier’s Chicago and San Francisco hubs and could be used as a stand-in for long-haul services to Asia, London and Frankfurt if required, UAL Corp. spokesman Mike Trevino said. The plane may be removed from the fleet again this fall, he said.

British Airways and Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific have both idled planes near Victorville on the southern edge of the Mojave Desert in California. Arid locations are favored for storage because the hot, dry conditions hamper corrosion.

Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Europe’s second-biggest airline, is looking to reactive a single jumbo stored in Germany after returning about a dozen short-haul planes and smaller wide- bodies to service, spokesman Peter Schneckenleitner said. The carrier has yet to decide where to deploy the jetliner.