The Latvian airline airBaltic transported a total of 3 523 300 passengers, in 2017 — or 22% more than last year to its network spanning Europe, Scandinavia, Russia, CIS and the Middle East. It is the highest number of passengers carried in airline’s history.

Martin Gauss (main picture), chief executive officer of airBaltic: “2017 was an outstanding year. We launched 13 new destinations, introduced seven brand-new Bombardier CS300 aircraft and became the most punctual airline globally. During the second half of the year we beat our passenger records each month. Our team has done a fantastic job in making sure everything runs smoothly.”

“Now airBaltic is off to a very good start for 2018. This year we will offer our passengers an even greater choice of convenient travel opportunities with at least 8 new destinations added to our route map. We will continue the sustainable growth path and good operational results envisaged by our business plan Horizon 2021,” Gauss added.

The airline’s load factor, which represents the number of passengers as a proportion of the number of available seats, was at a level of 76% in 2017, which is a 2.0 percentage points more than in 2016. In 2017, the Latvian carrier operated a total of 50 093 flights.

The regularity of airBaltic reached 99.43% in 2017, exceeding company’s internal target. Which means that the airline operated more than 99 out of every 100 scheduled flights last year.

On January 3, 2018, it was announced that airBaltic has been ranked No 1 globally in punctuality in 2017 by OAG analysts, who tracked the performance of a total of over 50 million flight records. airBaltic has been on the top of the global on-time performance ranking for the past four consecutive years. According to OAG, airBaltic achieved a punctuality rating of 90.01% for flights linking the Baltics to its network —  meaning that more than 90 out of 100 airBaltic flights arrived on time in 2017.