Tuesday, 24 January 2006
 European no-frills airline Ryanair is looking for a second airport to fly from in Finland, a Ryanair executive was quoted as saying in an interview published on Tuesday.
"We have been very pleased with Finland," Karl Hogstadius, deputy director of the airline's Nordic and Baltic operations, told business daily Taloussanomat. "Last year we had around 350,000 passengers. This year we forecast 400,000-450,000." Ryanair, which has been expanding aggressively in Europe, currently flies from Tampere Airport, 175 km (110 miles) north of Finland's capital Helsinki, to three destinations in Europe.
The paper gave no further details on when Ryanair hoped to start operations from another Finnish airport.
Finland is the home turf of national carrier Finnair, whose chief executive said at the weekend he doubted that no-frills carriers could operate low-priced flights from Finland to Europe for very long.
Icelandic FL Group's no-frills airline Sterling is due to start flights from Helsinki to 11 European destinations in March while Air Berlin is due to start a Helsinki-London service in February.
Lufthansa's germanwings, Swedish FlyME and Blue1, a subsidiary of Scandinavian airline SAS, also operate no-frills flights from Finland.
(Reuters)-airwise |
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