5 years of A220-300 commercial operations

I was not planning to write twice about airBaltic this week, but got two pieces of info that I thought worth commenting about here.

The first one, looking towards the future, is the new base airBaltic announced it will set up in the Finnish city of Tampere, from where the Latvian airline will fly to seven European destinations (its Riga hub and six other additional cities.

But I also got a reminder that on 14 December it was the 5th anniversary of the entry into service of the Airbus A220-300 (Bombardier CS300 at the time) with a flight between Riga and Amsterdam. This brought me great memories, because, although I was not on that first commercial flight of the A220-300, I was able to attend, a couple of weeks prior, the delivery of that very same aircraft, the first A220-300. The day after I was also able to jump onboard with airBaltic staff and partners and members of the media for an hour-long demonstration flight over Latvian airspace, taking off and landing at Riga airport.

In these 5 years, airBaltic’s A220-300 fleet has completed 86 000 flights, flown over 193 000 block hours and carried 7.1 million passengers.

So, a good opportunity to re-share again my first impressions of the Airbus A220-300 on that snowy day in Riga, in December 2016.

Some time later I had the chance to fly the airBaltic A220-300 commercially and here is the flight review I wrote: Flight Review: airBaltic A220 economy class