newstodate.aero

May 12, 2022 (newstodate): At a press conference in Helsinki today, the Finnish President and Prime minister have supported Finland's NATO membership application ASAP.
   The process will continue today with parties stating their position on the issue, and the application will be sent in the next days.
   While strongly supported by public opinion in Finland, the decision to join NATO will not make Finnair's life easier.
   While aviation talks before the Russian war on Ukraine between the three Scandinavian countries and Russia remained in a sustained limbo, Finland was always successful in raising the volumes of air services through Russian airspace and the Siberian air lanes.
   Earlier, Finnair managed to stay in good terms with Russia - even after the country's occupation of the Crimea in 2014, opening flights to a new destination, Kazan, in August 2014.
   In autumn 2014, Russia thus became the market with the largest number of destinations served by the carrier; Finnair operated scheduled flights from Helsinki to Moscow, St Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Kazan.
   Now, this is of course all gone..
   Even more troubling will be the effect from Finland's imminent NATO membership application on the carrier's Asian flights that are crucial to Finnair's commercial situation.
   Finnair is thus to turn its focus away from the North Asian markets to serving instead West and South Asian routes and, not least, the North Atlantic lanes, and this will have an impact on the size and composition of its aircraft fleet as well, and force the airline to operate in a new, highly competitive environment.