It’s a real rush. Now that the pandemic seems to be a thing of the past, airlines are coming back to life. The North Atlantic has their favourites: on Sunday March 26, the brand new Norwegian company Norse Atlantic Airways made its inaugural flight from Paris to reach New York. The arrival of Norse marks the resumption, post-Covid, of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Indeed, destinations between Europe and North America are the most profitable in the world for air carriers. Following the example of the joint venture on the North Atlantic between Air France-KLM and the American Delta Airlines which, in 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic, generated a staggering turnover of 13 billion dollars (regarding 12 billion euros). The London-New York route alone has earned British Airways more than a billion dollars.
Norse obviously wants his share of this gigantic windfall. The small low-cost company launched just nine months ago. It was created in June 2022 by Bjorn Tore Larsen. The 55-year-old Norwegian businessman made his fortune in shipping, building and leasing merchant ships and crews. A self-made man who dreamed of being a fighter pilot but left high school at 16 to join the merchant navy.
“A very good price”
Two years of sailing before launching a travel agency and then setting up, in 1999, his own maritime transport company. Smaller, a sort of Scandinavian CMA-CGM. Precisely, the French, world number three in maritime freight transport, has also decided to embark on the air by taking, in May 2022, 9% of the capital of Air France-KLM.
As a shrewd trader, Bjorn Tore Larsen has taken advantage of the opportunities created during the pandemic. “At that time, aircraft rental was very inexpensive”, remembers the founder and CEO of Norse. With air transport nailed to the ground, manufacturers Airbus and Boeing, as well as aircraft rental companies, found themselves with hundreds of aircraft on their hands not knowing what to do with them.
Above all, Mr. Larsen made his honey of the discomfiture of Norwegian. The company, which had launched into low-cost long-haul between North America and Europe, failed to get through the crisis. It went bankrupt in early 2021 posting a loss of more than 2 billion euros. Norwegian had been weighed down by the strategic inconsistencies of its management and its bulimia of aircraft purchases. She had ordered several hundred from Airbus and Boeing.
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