Norwegian Air’s April passenger count falls 99%

FAN Editor
FILE PHOTO: A Norwegian Air plane is refuelled at Oslo Gardermoen airport
FILE PHOTO: A Norwegian Air plane is refuelled at Oslo Gardermoen airport, Norway November 7, 2019. REUTERS/Lefteris Karagiannopoulos

May 7, 2020

OSLO (Reuters) – Norwegian Air’s <NWC.OL> passenger volume fell by 98.7% in April from a year earlier as most of its fleet was grounded due to the coronavirus pandemic, the budget airline said on Thursday.

It carried just 41,311 passengers, down from 3.14 million in April 2019.

Shareholders, bondholders and lessors agreed this week on a plan to convert nearly $1 billion of debt into equity and raise up to 400 million Norwegian crowns ($39 million) from the sale of new shares in a bid to rescue the airline.

“Norwegian continued to operate a limited number of domestic flights within Norway on behalf of the government to ensure that vital connectivity was maintained between regions,” the company said in a statement.

It also operated some flights between Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen in early April, it added.

“All other network activity was temporarily suspended and is therefore reflected in the sharp decline in traffic figures this month,” Norwegian said.

The plan to save the carrier will involve further restructuring, grounding 95% of the fleet for up to 12 months and leaving just seven aircraft in operation before a slow build-up can start in 2021, it said last month.

A pioneer in low-fare transatlantic air travel, Norwegian Air’s rapid expansion left it with some $8 billion of debt at the end of 2019, making it particularly vulnerable to the fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik; editing by Jan Harvey and Jason Neely)

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