Air Lituanica Secures E-Jet Leases for Business Launch

Lithuanian start-up Air Lituanica has entered into a partnership with fellow Baltic operator Estonian Air to support the carrier’s business launch at the end of June 2013. The carrier has opened reservations this week ahead of a proposed June 30, 2013 launch on routes linking the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, with points across Western Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and CIS.

Air Lituanica hopes to succeed where previous national entities Lithuanian Airlines and flyLAL have failed by establishing a sustainable network of routes from the Lithuania. The carrier hopes to overcome the problems of its predecessors and help establish new air services in the country but rather than establish itself as a large national entity, instead plans to fly small regional jet equipment on high frequency routes to key destinations where there is both leisure, but most importantly, corporate demand.




The niche business carrier will begin flying from its Vilnius base with two leased Embraer E-jet aircraft – one E170 leased from Estonian Air and one E175 leased from Embraer’s internal remarketing business ECC Leasing. Its first route will be the Belgian capital, Brussels, which will be served six times weekly from June 30, 2013, while daily flights to Amsterdam will follow from July 8, 2013 and four times weekly services to Berlin will follow from August 5, 2013. The first phase of its network development will also see services to Moscow, Munich and Prague introduced with later development seeing expansion into Scandinavia, Lithuania’s biggest trading partner, perhaps using smaller equipment.




The airline’s launch is being supported by Estonian Air with initial flights being flown using Estonian’s ‘OV’ flight code but being branded as Air Lituanica. This is due to the start-up not yet securing its own operating licence and flying on the Air Operator’s Certificate (AOC) of its Baltic partner. In addition to the lease and crewing of the 76-seat E170, which will remain in place through 2015, Estonian Air and Air Lituanica will cooperate in providing commercial services, like sales of tickets on point-to-point and connecting flights, revenue management, interline and codeshare agreements.




The airline’s other planned routes were also regularly served: Amsterdam was served by flyLAL up to December 2008 and then Estonian Air in 2010 and 2011; Berlin was linked by flyLAL, airBaltic and most recently by City Airline in 2010; Munich was served regularly from Vilnius by airBaltic between October 2004 and March 2011; while Prague has been linked to the Lithuanian capital by Czech Airlines for over ten years but the linked was closed in January 2013.

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