Color Air

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Color Air

IATA '	ICAO 'CLA	Callsign Pennant
Founded		1998
Hubs		Oslo Airport, Gardermoen
Fleet size		5
Destinations		5
Parent company		Color Line
Headquarters		Oslo
Key people		Founded by Olav Nils Sunde
Website: http://www.colorair.no

Color Air was the first Norwegian low-cost airline, operating from Gardermoen Airport, Oslo in 1998 and 1999. The airline operated a fleet of five Boeing 737-300 aircraft.

1 History
2 Destinations
3 Services
4 External links

[edit] History

The airline started operations 6th September 1998 with a Boeing 737-300 seating 142, between Fornebu Airport, Oslo and Ålesund Airport, Vigra. The airline was founded by the owner of the ferry company Color Line, Nils Olav Sunde, who wanted to start air operations to his home town Ålesund to transport ferry passengers to Oslo where they could take his ferries to, among other places, Denmark and Germany.

Before 1994 the Norwegian domestic market was regulated, and the routes had been split between Braathens S.A.F.E and Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS), with SAS flying from Oslo to Bergen and Braathens S.A.F.E flying from Oslo to Stavanger, Ålesund, and Trondheim, an agreement settled in 1952. But in 1994 the marked was opened for competition, and both SAS and Braathens S.A.F.E started competing on the routes from Oslo to Stavanger, Bergen, and Trondheim, but Braathens S.A.F.E kept its monopoly on the route to Ålesund.

On 8th October 1998 the new Oslo Airport, Gardermoen opened, replacing Fornebu. This eliminated the bottleneck in Norwegian aviation, and Color Air used this new capacity to also start domestic flights to Bergen Airport, Flesland, Stavanger Airport, Sola and Trondheim Airport, Værnes with five Boeing 737-300s. SAS met this competition by also introducing flights to Ålesund, while both SAS and Braathens increased the number of departures to all involved cities, exceeding 50 daily flights each way to each city. All three main city routes were among the ten domestic routes in Europe with the most seats.

The considerably lower prices that Color Air offered resulted in a price war between the three airlines. Though the other two airlines also offered low-fare tickets, these were often issued with restrictions concerning travel dates and refunds. But Color Air failed to win the business market, partially because of the lack of a loyalty program to attract business customers. Also, both SAS and Braathens had liquidity to lose vast amounts of money on the war; SAS could subsidize its routes from profits made domestically in Sweden and Denmark and from its international routes while Braathens had lots of cash and KLM as a major owner at the time.

On 1st October 1999 Color Air went bankrupt. It is estimated that the airline lost about half a billion NOK during the 13 months they operated.