In amongst the doom and gloom of the current airline market, Scandinavian budget carrier Norwegian is today highlighting record second quarter pre-tax profits of NKR245 million ($37.5 million). This compares to an NKR86 million loss at the same stage last year and comes off the back of revenues up more than a fifth to NKR1.9 billion.
Norwegian's CEO Bjorn Kjos says: "Despite operating in an industry facing large economic challenges, we deliver the most profitable second quarter in the company's history. Our competitive cost base enables us to be profitable across our whole route network. Despite the industry wide decline in traffic figures, both in Norway and Europe, Norwegian has experienced a significant passenger growth."
If you want to find out more about Norwegian, then click here to read our Airline Business cover interview with Bjorn Kjos from December (shortly after the carrier had moved into Copenhagen to exploit last year's collapse of Sterling). It also gives a great excuse to run one of the stunning photos (thanks to Tom Gordon at Billypix) we got of Kjos as part of the cover shoot. 
on July 14, 2009 9:35 PM | Reply
Kinda off topic, but have you guys addressed the standing room only policy with different airlines?
It's apparently a rumor - http://cli.gs/NggMdh - but I was curious to see how that was unfolding...
on July 15, 2009 8:46 AM | Reply
So far I think its just Spring Airlines in China and Ryanair which are running with this - or running with the publicity of this anyway (it appears to have replaced charging to use the toilets onboard as Ryanair's current topic as choice - they have a poll running about it on their website at the moment)
Take a look at a couple of blogs we have done on this, one from me last week and another from our colleagues on Asian Skies...
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/airline-business/2009/07/oleary-picks-up-on-spring-stan.html
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/asian-skies/2009/06/standing-room-only-on-board-ch.html