airBaltic: One mini-hub, two micro-bases
and 50 A220s — October 2021

AirBaltic is the world’s second largest operator of A220s, after Delta, 31 currently in its fleet and another 19 scheduled for delivery over the next two years. It is a truly niche airline operating a hub and spoke system at Riga, the capital of Latvia. It also has bases at the Estonian capital Tallinn and the Lithuanian capital Vilnius.

These three capitals are small in comparison to the main population centres in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, yet the core strategy is to capture passengers to/from the countries and funnel the thin flows through Riga to cities in western, southern and eastern Europe and even the Middle East; pre-pandemic, about 44% of airBaltic’s passengers connected through Riga. Tallinn and Vilnius are essentially point-to-point operations with only two or three aircraft based at each airport.