Adria Airways (Ljubljana) has formally confirmed it will open a base at Paderborn/Lippstadt in western Germany with the onset of the Winter 2018/19 season on October 29, 2018.

The Slovenian carrier will connect Paderborn with Zurich (11x weekly), Vienna (4x weekly), and London Southend (3x weekly). Adria will base one Saab 2000 out of Paderborn. The carrier has recently finalised the addition of six turboprops of the type, all ex-Darwin Airline stock acquired through Jetstream Aviation Capital.

The base opening was earlier unofficially planned for March 2018 but was delayed due to bureaucratic hurdles with adding the Saab (Sweden) turboprops.

According to the ch-aviation capacity module, Paderborn currently sees mostly domestic and leisure traffic and lacks services to foreign hub airports. In terms of hub connections, Lufthansa currently flies to Paderborn out of each of Munich and Frankfurt International. Other airlines, including Eurowings, LaudaMotion, SunExpress, Corendon Airlines, and Corendon Airlines Europe operate leisure routes to Palma de Mallorca, Antalya, and Heraklion.

For its part, Adria Airways has been expanding outside of Slovenia as its home market has limited growth potential. The carrier already operates a base in Pristina in Kosovo. Short of basing any aircraft out of there, it also operates direct services to Frankfurt and Munich from Tirana in Albania. Adria Airways is also wet-leasing aircraft to Luxair and Austrian Airlines. CEO Holger Kowarsch told ch-aviation in June that the ACMI market will be the carrier's main growth area in the coming months.

Adria Airways also used to operate a base at Lodz but the contract was terminated by the Polish airport in 2017.