TheLocal.no — The board of directors at Moss Airport Rygge, located some 60 kilometres south of Oslo, have decided to shut down the airport’s commercial operations after Irish carrier Ryanair threatened to abandon its base there.
The budget airline had said it will close its base at Rygge because of Norway’s new mandatory passenger charge that is scheduled to take effect on June 1st. Without Ryanair, passenger figures at Rygge would plummet from 1.6 million travellers last year to under 500,000.
Ryanair flies from Rygge directly to Chania and the closure of the airport will affect Crete flights to and from Norway.
The planned closure of Rygge on November 1st is expected to cost 500 direct jobs and an additional 500 indirect positions.
Despite the blow to local employees, Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg defended Norway’s new passenger charge.
“No Norwegian airports will close because of a fee on flights,” Solberg wrote on Facebook. “In this specific instance, it is about Ryanair choosing not to use the airport at Rygge, apparently because of the new fee – a fee that doesn’t appear to hinder Ryanair from flying to other airports in Norway.”
Solberg said it was unfortunate that Moss Airport Rygge had become so dependent on Ryanair that the airline’s departure amounts to a death knell but she said the government wouldn’t bow in the face of pressure from Ryanair.
The new tax will be introduced on June 1. If Ryanair really does lay down its base at Rygge, the traffic at the airport will be discontinued on November 1, the board notified Tuesday night.
Ryanair will not comment the Rygge-closure
Ryanair’s communications advisor Hans-Jørgen Elnæs will not comment on the decision by the board at the Rygge civil airport to close the Moss Airport, Rygge.
– We have no comments on this. We have highlighted our stance towards the media in Norway before, and beyond that, we have nothing to add, says Hans-Jørgen Elnæs, Communications advisor in Ryanair, to NRK.
