airBaltic to open Barents hub in Oulu
Oulu in northern Finland will be the “Arctic Gateway” as airBaltic today announced they will open some 10 to 15 direct flights from the city. Likely to be linked to the hub are seven Barents cities, including Tromsø, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.
airBaltic announced the opening of the new hub in Oulu in a press-release sent out from the airliner’s main office in Riga, Latvia.
The airport in Oulu are the second busiest in Finland and will be substantially expanded over the coming few years, according to the web-portal of Finavia, the company that operates the network of the 25 airports in Finland.
Full hub operations will mean 10-15 airBaltic operated direct destinations out of Oulu, the biggest city in the Finnish part of the Barents Region. Today, airBaltic operates six direct flights to Riga from other cities in the Barents Region; Umeå, Tromsø, Arkhangelsk, Rovaniemi, Kittilä and Kuusamo.
BarentsObserver has earlier reported that airBaltic is considering to start flights also from three other cities in northern Norway; namely Kirkenes, Lakselv and Bodø.
With the new airBaltic hub at the airport in Oulu in operation from 2012, the flights with airBaltic from northern Norway, northern Russia and other airports in Finnish Lapland will likely go to the new hub.
The Oulu based newspaper Kaleva writes on Thursday that airBaltic most likely will enter a three-step development of its route-network from Oulu airport. First, the four other airports in northern Finland will be connected with flights to Oulu. They are Kuusamo, Rovaniemi, Kittilä and Ivalo.
Next step will be route network to other Barents cities like Tromsø in Northern Norway and Murmansk and Arkhangelsk in northern Russia.
If Oulu develops positively as an attractive hub, the third phase will include flights to Moscow, St. Petersburg and Copenhagen, according to Kaleva.
airBaltic will with its new hub in Oulu be the main interconnector of flights between east and west in the Barents Region. Today, the only direct cross-border flight within the Barents Region is the Nordavia operated route between Arkhangelsk and Tromsø via Murmansk.
During the last two decades, several airline companies have tried to establish east-west connections between cities in the Barents Region. In the 90ties, Braathens had Boeing 737 flights between Tromsø and Murmansk. Several other airliners with smaller airplanes have also made unsuccessful attempts to establish economical sustainable flights across the borders in the north.
The Swedish company Barents Air Link had flights between Tromsø and Luleå, and the Norwegian company Widerøe has two times operated flights between Kirkenes and Murmansk. Arkhangelsk airlines (today named Nordavia) also operated flights from Arkhangelsk to Rovaniemi and Luleå via Murmansk.
