Icelandair (FI, Reykjavik Keflavik) will scale up to eighteen B737 MAX as it signs a letter of intent (LOI) for the purchase of four more of the type, the Icelandic flag carrier has announced.
The four aircraft were built in 2018 and are scheduled to be delivered this coming autumn. The airline’s chief executive, Bogi Nils Bogason, said that the fleet expansion had been agreed “on favourable terms.”
“The MAX has proven to be a good fit to our route network, and its fuel efficiency contributes positively to our efforts to reduce the carbon emissions from our operations,” he explained.
“We have been ramping up our operations, expanding our strong route network that connects Europe and North America via Iceland. This summer we offer direct flights from Iceland to 44 destinations, up to five times a day. This addition to our fleet allows us to further increase our services by adding new destinations and increasing frequency to our current destinations.”
Icelandair conducted its inaugural route to Raleigh/Durham in North Carolina last month, a seasonal route from Reykjavik Keflavik operated 4x weekly until October. It is its 11th destination in the United States and 13th in North America, the ch-aviation capacities module shows.
According to the ch-aviation fleets module, Icelandair currently operates a total of 42 aircraft. Of these, eight are B737-8s and four are B737-9s, all of which are leased and all of which are active. Two more from the -8 series are due to be delivered in the coming months. Icelandair has not revealed which MAX version the newly announced jets will be.
Bogason told ch-aviation in March that Icelandair Group was able, after being hard-hit by the pandemic, to refocus on its pre-Covid plans for fleet renewal. For the short term, however, the current composition of the MAX, the B767-300ER, of which it has three, the B757-200 of which it has eighteen, and the B757-300 of which it has two, suits the route network well.
On June 7, the company divulged in its traffic figures for May that total capacity was 75% of May 2019 capacity levels, with the total number of Icelandair passengers at around 316,000 compared to 40,000 in May 2021 and 242,000 in April this year.
