Adria Airways is following Thomas Cook and suspended all flights today. German Condor may be next.
Slovenia-based Adria Airways said it would suspend all flights on Tuesday and Wednesday due to “unsecured access to fresh cash which the airline needs for further flight operations”.
Adria’s corporate headquarters are located on the grounds of Ljubljana Airport in Zgornji Brnik, Cerklje na Gorenjskem, Slovenia, near Ljubljana.
“The company is at this point intensively searching solutions in cooperation with a potential investor. The goal of everyone involved is to make Adria Airways fly again,” it said in a statement late on Monday.
Slovenia had sold Adria to German investment fund 4K Invest in 2016. Since then the company sold all its planes and was using leased planes to fly to several European destinations.
In March 2016, 4K Invest, a Luxembourg-based restructuring fund, acquired 96% of Adria Airways’ shares from the Slovene state. The new owner appointed Arno Schuster as the CEO of Adria.
On the 1st of July 2017, Adria suspended its base in the Polish city of Łódź, from which it held flights with its stationed CRJ700 aircraft, registered S5-AAZ, for the previous three years. During this time, Adria had also opened two other bases in Poland, one in Rzeszów and one in Olsztyn; however, both were terminated fairly quickly. Adria is now set to focus more on its main hub on Ljubljana Airport, which has already seen a boost in the frequencies of flights to a couple of destinations served by Adria. These destinations include Amsterdam, Podgorica, Pristina, Sarajevo and Skopje.
On 20 July 2017, Adria announced the purchase of Darwin Airline, which operates flights as Etihad Regional and was owned by Etihad Airways. The airline will market itself as Adria Airways Switzerland, but continue its operations as Darwin Airline with the existing air operator’s certificate (AOC). Adria will be responsible for marketing and some administrative and operational tasks. However, as of now, this won’t directly impact the airline’s operations as a whole, as the two bases will remain in Geneva and Lugano.
In September 2017, it was revealed that Adria sold its brand for 8 million Euros to an undisclosed buyer in December of the previous year.
In November 2017, Adria announced new flights from the Swiss city of Bern, which came as a result of SkyWork Airlines, previously the largest operator out of Belp Airport, losing its AOC. The flights to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna were set to begin on November 6, 2017, and were to be operated by the subsidiary Adria Airways Switzerland, however, these plans were cancelled only days after the announcement, as SkyWork managed to regain its AOC.
In recent years, Adria has focused on ad hoc flights, which are mainly operated for large automotive companies, such as Ford, Chrysler and Ferrari.
On 12 December 2017, Adria’s Swiss subsidiary Darwin Airline, which operated as Adria Airways Switzerland, was declared bankrupt and its AOC was revoked. The airline ended all operations.[37]
In January 2019, Adria Airways announced it would shut down its short-lived focus city operations at Paderborn Lippstadt Airport in Germany which consisted of three routes to London (which had already ceased in late 2018), Vienna and Zürich. In the same time, major cuts to its route network from the airline’s home base in Ljubljana have been published with all services to Brač, Bucharest, Dubrovnik, Düsseldorf, Geneva, Hamburg, Kiev, Moscow and Warsaw being terminated.
