Ryanair Announces the Opening of its first Base in Norway

It now seems that Ryanair will be opening up its very first base in Norway. With the opening of this new base comes 1,700 new jobs for the area. The budget airline will be opening the base at Oslo Rygge Airport in March.

Ryanair will spend $200 million on the base with three aircrafts and 16 new routes. All of this is on top of the six routes that the airline already operates at the airport. The airline hopes to boost its annual traffic to the airport to 1.7 million passengers.

Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, said that the expansion will create and sustain 1,700 jobs at the airport. Ryanair will offer 100 weekly return flights to and from Oslo Rygge to destinations such as Malaga, Venice and Berlin.

This announcement just comes a few days after the airline said that it will launch ten brand new routes from Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Glasgow airports starting February of next year. As a result of these new routes, the airline will add a fifth aircraft to Bristol and increase its Liverpool fleet from six to eight.

Experts say that these new expansion plans seem to put to rest the rumors that the airline was thinking of easing back on its new routes. These rumors got started as the recession seemed to be getting worse and many other airlines were starting to drop routes.

These new routes also come after the airline reported a 35 percent jump in net profits. This takes the airline’s net profits, for the three months to September 30^th to 250.5 million euros.