To the people of Cork, I'd say use it or lose it. If you're going to drive up to SNN or DUB because it's cheaper then sooner or later you won't have the local route any more.

Look what happened with EWR from Belfast; by all accounts the DUB-EWR was popular with northerners trying to save a few pounds.

If the prices for tickets are above the promotional rate stay at that level, I can't see Shannon and Dublin succeeding, while Cork and Belfast will struggle, but may do a bit better as the only direct link.

However, I'm sure there will be continual promotional sales for the routes, much as Ryanair do with their routes.

Yes time to use it after it finally happens. Saving a few pounds.....sure they can't help themselves £££

I agree. Think Norwegian`s most successful routes out of Ireland will be Cork and Belfast as there is less competition to these cities compared to Dublin and Shannon.
Norwegian will of course be competing against WOW from both Cork and Belfast so that should keep prices good for the consumer.
The rail link from Providence airport to Boston and the short lines for immigration at this small airport make it quite appealing too.

Norwegian are using the time between their transatlantic aircraft arriving in and leaving Edinburgh to operate a flight to Oslo.

Does anyone see similar potential for a route out of Cork?

The catch would seem to be that from the timings the route couldn't practically be more than 90 minutes flying time away. You would also think that it would need to be to one of their European bases. The only airport that fits those criteria is Gatwick, where they would be going head to head with Ryanair. A bit of competition to London and more frequency to Gatwick in particular would be welcome, but it would need to be a brave move.

Would crewing not be an issue?

And Gatwick at 2pw, really?

Norwegian takes transatlantic battle up a level with Belfast, Cork, Dublin, Edinburgh and Shannon launches

Norwegian 737MAX aircraft usage is explained in the article above btw^^^

I don't think Gatwick would work full stop as Ryanair would surely react. 2pw/3pw would certainly be an issue as well, but were flights to Stewart launch, they could be more frequent.

To be honest, I haven't worked out how crewing is going to work for the current set of flights. Are they intending on shuttling crew around Ireland? If anything linking up with another base could make crewing easier.

Base them in one spot and rotate them through the network possibly, although DUB is three hours or less from all the 3 other airports in Ireland.

Can't see D8 doing an Oslo, if routes like BRU and FCO don't stack up, you can rule it out. In relation to LGW, apart from potentially amounting to financial suicide, they'd be unlikely to go in, there seems to be a bit of friendly neutrality going on between FR and DY/D8, FR have been scaling back on Oslo routes, blaming taxes, which by default helps DY, MOL made approaches on the topic of D8 getting permission to fly IRL-USA, and while that may suit his agenda of hitting Aer Lingus, it also smacks of collaboration between the two. Talk of interline is hot in the media, it would seem the two can compliment each other well ..

Oslo is too far for the time available from Cork.

The only other place that might fit the time available is Edinburgh. At the moment that's a bit of a cash cow for Aer Lingus Regional. It might also not suffer so badly from a low frequency operation as London.

Got a e-mail from aer-lingus re 25 per cent off fares as I only fly from Cork I checked fares

CORK AMSTERDAM 400 EURO RETURN
DUBLIN AMSTERDAM 100 EURO RETURN

HIGH YIELD FROM CORK

Lots of returns for 100-105 in May/June which the enail refers to. Booking last minute or when there is an event on will cost a lot more.

Exactly, don't cherry pick examples and use them as generalisations! Discredits your entire point.

Also, if Dublin is cheaper, there is a brutal amount of competition there now, with the market going from 5 daily to 14 daily.

Dublin is cheaper, both with EI and FR. If you are prepared to put up with the inconvience of the Aircoach then it can be worth your while.

There may be high yield from Cork, but overall return on assets and the competitive nature of the Dublin market means most airlines prefer to offer cheaper flights out of the Dublin market - serving the whole island, rather than offer seats out of Cork. Encouragingly there have been signs that this is beginning to change, hopefully more will follow the likes of Iberia and Swiss.

If I was a carrier looking at Cork, I would be very reticent about going in. Both Aer Lingus and Ryanair have a record of chasing out other airlines. Why would an airline establish a route only to see someone else take the profit? The route support scheme may need some kind of alteration to shield airlines opening up a route from that kind of behaviour.

For Iberia Express, the decision was easier. The shared ownership with Aer Lingus halved the problem.

Swiss are presumably assuming that Ryanair aren't going to touch Zurich and that Aer Lingus don't see the competition in such a small operation and the route as too thin for an A320.

Fair enough, but it's hard to see what that alteration could be.

Say Airline A launches a hitherto unserved route and gets the benefit of the new-route discount scheme. Then Airline B (or Airline R if you like :hmm:) decides they want the interloper gone, so they come onto the route. They won't normally get a discount on landing fees (as it's not an unserved route) so they'll likely have to pay published tariffs, but there is nothing the airport can do to stop them, and Airline R may just feel that it's worth taking the loss for a few months to teach the upstart a lesson and get rid of them. Unless the airport wants to cover all of Airline A's losses (not going to happen!), there's nothing that airport management can really do to stop this. Going to Airline R and saying "please play nicely with others" isn't going to achieve anything either. Sad but true. An airport's management doesn't have anything like the power that some excitable posters on here (not you, 840!) seem to think they have - "Why doesn't management get Airline X to start a service?" "Why doesn't management refuse to let Airline Y in to compete like this?"

My understanding is that so long as an airport's rules are clear and undiscriminatory, it shouldn't be a problem. So, a rule that further raised the landing fees for anyone launching in competition to a start-up route would be fine, so long as it had a definite lifespan.

If that is so, why are Cork/Shannon not doing it currently​?