A big week for Tampa International Airport, Florida’s 4th busiest highlights our commercial aviation update.

• Eurowings Discover will make Tampa its first US destination with nonstop service to Frankfurt beginning December 16. The airline I am reliably told will serve Fort Myers in the near future as well.
• Frontier will add new nonstops this winter from Tampa to Bloomington, IL, Columbus, Green Bay, New York-LaGuardia and Rochester, NY.
• Dominican Capital Air will begin flying nonstop from Tampa to Santo Domingo this winter.
• One piece of bad news: British Airways will not fly to Tampa in October.

Other news

• As reported in August by The Guardian, Fort Lauderdale will be one of the three planned initial destinations for Norse Atlantic Airways. The new airline filed an application with the DOT this week to fly nonstop Oslo-Fort Lauderdale service. That route was last served by Norwegian Air Shuttle from 2013 to 2020. Norse Atlantic’s application isn’t a slam-dunk. Many interested parties have registered complaints that Norse Atlantic is a “flag of convenience” airline that intends to dodge labor laws by registering in Norway while setting up bases in London and Paris. But the initial application for flights from Oslo would indicate at least initially the airline is focused on its “home” country. The Guardian piece in August had mentioned that the airline would fly from London to Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles and New York which raised red flags. Speaking of labor laws, it should be noted Eurowings Discover which we discussed above has been set up by Lufthansa for exactly the same purpose – to reduce costs and bust unions.

• Royal Air Maroc will resume Miami-Casablanca nonstops in May. They have been suspended due to COVID since March 2020.

• Air Canada will not fly to Sarasota this winter as of now, however that could change if COVID is more under control in Florida in the near future.

• Both JetBlue and Caribbean Airlines have cut Fort Lauderdale-Port of Spain nonstops until March.

• JetBlue is cutting Fort Lauderdale to Palm Springs nonstops. This was one of only handful of routes flown to Palm Springs by any airline to/from east of the Mississippi (and the only one to/from Florida in history). It quite frankly never made much sense. Why would we from Florida want to go to a place that’s even hotter to vacation?!?

• Spirit will fly Fort Lauderdale-Pensacola nonstops every day as planned. Last week’s zeroing out of availability which we reported I am told was a “filing error.”

• Virgin Atlantic will not resume London-Orlando nonstops until November. Resumption of Manchester-Orlando nonstops is still on hold indefinitely. Again, like with Air Canada to Sarasota, if we see a dip in Florida Covid numbers to acceptable levels probably means this flight comes back in the near future.

• Southwest will not fly Fort Lauderdale-Grand Cayman nonstops for the forseeable future. The flight was originally supposed to return next week. United has also cut all nonstops to Grand Cayman through the winter (which are from Chicago, Houston, Newark and Washington) so this indicates COVID-related issues in the Cayman Islands. In any even, Southwest’s FLL-GCM nonstop which was to resume October 7 after being suspended since March 2020 due to COVID will not resume until April at the earliest.