Banja Luka International Airport is back in operation after a month and a half since its closure. As of January 15th, due to the rehabilitation of concrete maneuvering surfaces and the runway, all flights were canceled. The management is announcing new airlines and expects twice as many passengers as last year when there were 149 thousand of them.
Flights to Brussels, Belgrade, Gothenburg, Memmingen, Vienna, Frankfurt, Milan, Bergamo, and Stockholm are active again at Banja Luka International Airport. Director Milan Racic announces more new airlines. Two are certain – for Nuremberg and Egypt. He expects a “boom” with flights from April.
”In the seventh month we had a record of 27.800 and in the eighth month, we broke that record. If we look at the second half of the year and 149.000 passengers, it is realistic to have 300.000 passengers,” said Milan Racic, director of Banja Luka Airport.
”During the extraordinary control, the inspectors of the Civil Aviation Directorate of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)determined that the maneuvering areas at Banja Luka International Airport were repaired in accordance with the necessary documentation and based on previously announced measures determined that there are no obstacles to safe traffic,”noted Aleksandar Lalovic, spokesman for the BiH Civil Aviation Directorate.
”It is an airport that has the least days under the fog of all airports in the former Yugoslavia. When it was seen that the runway was such that it is possible to take off and land from the west and north, experts from abroad stated that it was of great potential. Within a radius of 200 kilometers, one million people are gravitating,” told Aleksandar Ljuboja, economist.
Economists have calculated that the average traveler from Western Europe spends another 300 euros on other content in addition to the ticket. If the situation on the geopolitical level normalizes, it can be expected that Banja Luka Airport will have a record number of passengers this year.
