Air Greenland (GL, Nuuk) will again wet-lease in B737 capacity from Jettime (JP, Copenhagen Kastrup) under a summer-season ACMI contract, with the Danish carrier operating flights to the island country from both Copenhagen Kastrup and Billund. Jettime’s flights will reach the southern airport of Narsarsuaq as well as Kangerlussuaq.
According to ch-aviation schedules analysis, Jettime will operate a B737-800 for Air Greenland 2x weekly between the Danish capital and Kangerlussuaq, Greenland’s international hub on the western coast, between June 19 and September 29. It will operate Billund-Kangerlussuaq 1x weekly between June 21 and August 30. And it will fly twice from Copenhagen to Narsarsuaq, on June 29 and July 4.
There is demand for further flights on an ACMI basis, but for now Greenland does not have enough beds to cope with so many visitors, Jacob Nitter Sørensen, the Greenlandic airline's chief executive, told Airways Magazine. He explained: “In summer, hotels are fully occupied, so adding more flights beyond this doesn’t work until there’s infrastructure growth to accommodate more. So all in all we expect a busy summer on the flying side, but we can’t grow for the time being.”
He added: “Greenland is a very, very small market with potentially two international airports opening in the near future, and at this moment we build capacity with [newly acquired A330-800N named] Tuukkaq and also the ACMI for temporary capacity needs. Since our peak demand is during summer, it makes sense for us to follow the ACMI model to fill the capacity, at least for now. But at one point we will reach a point where it would make sense to add our own aircraft.”
Air Greenland took delivery of its new flagship A330, OY-GKN (msn 2020), in December and inducted it into revenue service, taking over from its sole A330-200, a transition the CEO described as having gone “flawlessly”. Apart from this, it operates a fleet of six DHC-8-Q200s and one DHC-8-200, the ch-aviation fleets module shows.
Nitter Sørensen also reiterated Air Greenland’s earlier plans to start to acquire its own narrowbody fleet, for which commonality with the A330 makes A320 Family aircraft “the best choice”.
Nuuk, Greenland's capital where the airline has its main base, and Ilulissat airports are undergoing an expansion that will allow narrowbody flights there from late 2024. Asked how this will change operations, the chief executive replied: “The domestic network will change quite a bit as today we feed a lot of passengers out of [Kangerlussuaq] and nearly 50% of passengers are headed to Nuuk or llulissat, so the feeder service will gradually disappear.”
South Greenland will also have a new airport when Qaqortoq replaces Narsarsuaq, scheduled for 2025, “so we’re expecting to connect the south through Nuuk. Nuuk and llulissat will have flights to Copenhagen. We’re looking at single-day travel from most of Europe to Greenland. We’ll also use ACMI here initially, while Tuukkaq will continue to be the backbone of our operations,” he said.
