At the same time, the first Adria crew and technical teams were trained by JAT Yugoslav Airlines and the air force.
[2][3] During the following years, Adria gradually acquired a market with tourist flights from Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia to airports on the Adriatic coast.
After a compulsory settlement, Adria continued its operations largely thanks to the efforts of the president of the Slovenian Chamber of the Commerce and Industry of the time.
Thus began a period of modernisation of the fleet, which allowed Adria to increase its share on the tourist flights market.
[citation needed] In the late 1970s, Adria was awarded as most punctual carrier on the charter flight market.
The greatest commercial successes of that period were achieved on the German market which was also the largest at that time, in a productive partnership with Grimex Company.
In 1982, Adria got a new leadership which focused on the education of the flight crews, technical staff and other professional personnel as well as on ensuring safety.
Prospects for the development of air traffic were very good, so in 1984, Adria signed a contract for the purchase of five Airbus A320 aircraft.
The majority of charter destinations from Western Europe to the Adriatic coast had become inaccessible as they were now situated on the territory of other countries.
Adria began to set up a network of scheduled flights around Europe to serve the needs of an independent Slovenia.
In 1996, in line with the administration's rescue programme, a rehabilitation procedure was started the aim of which was to enable the company to run on market principles.
Cities like Sarajevo, Skopje, Ohrid, Tirana were connected with Scandinavia, United Kingdom, Germany and France.
In 2001, Adria Airways recorded a large decrease in the number of annual passengers as a result of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In July 2002, Bombardier Aerospace selected Adria as the first authorised heavy maintenance facility for CRJ aircraft in Europe.
Later that month, flights to Marseille were started, offering Turkish truck drivers a connection from Istanbul via Ljubljana.
On 14 January 2011, CEO Tadej Tufek and Executive Director Marjan Ravnikar resigned because of bad results in their last years of leadership.
With the beginning of Winter 2011/12 timetable, Adria dropped flights to Banja Luka, London, Paris, Toulon and Warsaw.
In August 2012, Ljubljana Airport reported that it had a new airline to operate on a London-Luton route, and therefore Adria removed it from the winter and summer 2013 timetable.
[27] In March 2016, 4K Invest, a Luxembourg-based restructuring fund, acquired 96% of Adria Airways' shares from the Slovene state.
[28] On 1 July 2017, Adria suspended its base in the Polish city of Łódź, from which it held flights with its stationed CRJ700 aircraft, registered S5-AAZ, for the previous three years.
[31] In September 2017, it was revealed that Adria sold its brand for 8 million Euros to an undisclosed buyer in December of the previous year.
[32] In November 2017, Adria announced new flights from the Swiss city of Bern, which came as a result of SkyWork Airlines, previously the largest operator out of Belp Airport, losing its AOC.
The flights to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Vienna were set to begin on 6 November 2017, and were to be operated by the subsidiary Adria Airways Switzerland, however these plans were cancelled only days after the announcement, as SkyWork managed to regain its AOC.
[33][34] In recent years, Adria has focused on ad hoc flights, which are mainly operated for large automotive companies, such as Ford, Chrysler and Ferrari.
[36] In January 2019, Adria Airways announced it would shut down its short-lived focus city operations at Paderborn Lippstadt Airport in Germany which consisted of three routes to London (which had already ceased in late 2018), Vienna and Zürich.
[37] At the same time, major cuts to the route network from the airline's home base in Ljubljana were announced, with all services to Brač, Bucharest, Dubrovnik, Düsseldorf, Geneva, Hamburg, Kyiv, Moscow and Warsaw being terminated.
[43] In a third delay announcement, on 27 September, the company said that it would continue to suspend service to all destinations except Frankfurt until the afternoon of Monday the 30th.
[45] On 30 September 2019, Adria Airways announced that it had officially filed for bankruptcy, ending 58 years of service.
[46] Slovenia's economic development minister Zdravko Počivalšek said that an option to set up a new airline within a few months in order to maintain important air links was being studied.
The airline's scheduled charter flights were for the most part seasonal, and most frequently to holiday destinations in the Mediterranean region.