Norse Atlantic revises maiden flight to 2Q22

Norse Atlantic Airways (Oslo Gardermoen) will launch ticket sales by the end of March ahead of its maiden commercial flight “in the second quarter” of the year from Oslo to a yet-to-be-confirmed destination in the United States, the low-cost long-haul start-up revealed on February 4.

Last summer, the Norwegian carrier initially pencilled in a December 2021 launch date before pushing that back to April 2022. It has not now specifically named April.

“We can confirm that our goal is to launch ticket sales by the end of March and our first flight to take off in the second quarter,” CEO Bjørn Tore Larsen said in the statement. “We are working on finalising our route network and look forward to announcing our destinations when we open for sale.”

Norse Atlantic also said it had signed collective bargaining agreements with pilot and cabin crew unions in Norway, the US, and the UK. Pilot training has commenced for an initial set of 50 positions based at Oslo Gardermoen, the carrier elaborated.

The first cabin crew base will be at Fort Lauderdale Int’l, where training for the first class of a total of more than 400 team members will start in a few weeks. Cabin crew bases at other locations will be set up as operations scale up.

Norse Atlantic Airways took delivery of its first of fifteen B787-9s in late December. It now has four of them, the ch-aviation fleets advanced module shows, which are currently parked at Oslo. Another eight of the type plus three B787-8s will make up the airline’s Dreamliner fleet. The remaining eleven widebody twinjets “will be delivered consecutively in the coming months,” the airline said, adding that it “will start to cautiously and gradually add capacity in line with demand.”