After hinting at it for years, Atlantic Airways has officially unveiled plans to fly from the Faroe Islands to New York City during the late summer and early autumn months.
Atlantic Airways Will Launch A320neo Service From Vágar, Faroe Islands To New York Stewart Airport In Summer 2023
Atlantic Airways is the flag carrier of the Faroe Islands, a semi-autonomous region of Denmark located on a remote archipelago of 18 islands between the Shetland Islands and Iceland. The islands are served via Vágar (FAE) on SAS and Atlantic Airways.
Atlantic Airways serves a handful of destinations in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and Continental Europe but has never served North America. That changes this summer, as Atlantic Airways has announced it will launch once-weekly flights between Vágar and New York Stewart (SWF) starting on August 22, 2023 and run until October 10, 2023.
The flight will depart the Faroe Islands on Tuesdays and return from Stewart on Wednesday, which gives the crew a day to rest. Atlantic Airways will utilize an Airbus A320neo for the new route.
The very brief six weeks of flying represents a test…will there be demand? Will the Faroe Islands, with limited infrastructure for tourism, be able to handle the influx of new visitors? But already, there are plans to resume service next spring for a longer period if this first set of flights is successful.
It will be interesting to see if Atlantic Airways markets these flights as point-to-point or if it takes an Iceland Air approach and encourages a stopover on the Faroe Islands while either coming from or traveling to Europe.
Tickets sales will launch on May 15.
Later today, coincidentally, I will be launching a new trip report on my recent visit to the Faroe Islands. To sum it up, the Faroe Islands are incredibly gorgeous and an absolute must-see place. Heck, I was there in the rainy season where the hills were more brown than green and it will still breathtakingly beautiful.
CONCLUSION
Atlantic Airways will launch service to New York this summer, subject to regulatory approval. The 6-week experiment will run from late August to early October, utilizing an A320 aircraft. Ticket sales will launch in May. I’m very excited for this new service!
image: Atlantic Airways
My bet is that the bulk of the passengers will be Vagar-originating passengers on these once per week flights in each direction. The islands are trying to keep women and young families interested in staying resident there rather than moving away for additional opportunities, so maybe this will help.
These islands are Danish but not part of the EU due to a semi-autonomous status. They speak a distinct language from Danish, and even mutual intelligibility with their Icelandic neighbors is rather low..
But it seems like written Faroese is not all that far removed from Icelandic in terms of intelligibility.
Outside of the Nordics and travel dorks like us, I have to imagine it remains a very unknown destination. It’s cool these flights are launching, but their success seems unlikely… but who knows?
I’m just glad you’re going to be able to publish your trip report before whatever TPG writer gets flown there as a guest on the inaugural. In this case, the destination is much more interesting than the A320NEO flight.
This is terrible news.
I was there 3 years ago, and the place was crawling with YouTubers and Instagram idiots, all literally pushing other people out of the way to get that shot. Complete a-holes, every one of them. The locals were fed up with them traipsing across farms and protected areas, they were putting up signs threatening arrest.
Hopefully the “Stewart” connection will limit the demand and resultant damage, but this is a place that will not hold up well to mass tourism. Very unfortunate.
A problem of using Stewart is that many travellers to the USA want onward connections, as the US does not have a capital city which dominates over all other cities. But Stewart does not have many connections. It seems also less good regarding ground transport to New York City.