Norwegian Long Haul

The airline was registered in Dublin, Ireland, and was managed by parent company Norwegian Air Shuttle from its head office at Fornebu, Norway.

[5] On 26 May 2011, Norwegian Air Shuttle entered a letter of intent to acquire purchase rights from Icelandair for three additional Boeing 787-8s.

[9] Two years following its initial letter of intent for its first Boeing 787 order, Norwegian on 8 November 2012 announced the opening of ticket reservations for its upcoming long-haul services, which consisted of flights from Oslo Gardermoen (Norway) and Stockholm Arlanda (Sweden) to New York JFK (United States) and Bangkok (Thailand), with the services announced to launch on 30 May 2013.

[14] Norwegian's long-haul operations began on 30 May 2013 as previously announced, but initially with the wet-leased Airbus A340-300 aircraft while the airline still awaited delivery of its Boeing 787s.

[19][20] In October 2013, Norwegian announced the airline's first European long-haul destination outside of Scandinavia, with flights from London Gatwick to New York, Los Angeles, and Fort Lauderdale, and that the services would commence in July 2014.

[21] On 18 December 2013, the airline announced that it had ordered two Boeing 787-9s through a lease agreement with MG Aviation, with the first 787-9 expected to arrive in early 2016.

[29][30][31] In July 2016, the airline launched its second European long-haul destination outside of Scandinavia, with flights from Paris Charles de Gaulle to New York, Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale.

[33] In April 2017, the airline announced flights from London to Seattle, Denver, and its second Asian long-haul destination, Singapore, to begin in September 2017.

[42] In July 2018, the airline announced new winter seasonal services to Krabi in Thailand from Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen to begin from October 2018.

[55] In October 2020, operations for the airline were scheduled to resume from its Paris-Charles de Gaulle base in March 2021 to Los Angeles and New York JFK, and to Austin, Boston, Denver, and Orlando in May 2021, in anticipation of the pandemic's impacts subsiding.

[56] In January 2021 however, Norwegian announced it would terminate all long-haul operations in order to refocus on its short-haul European route network.

[57][58] During March 2021, Norse Atlantic announced that it planned to launch long-haul flights between Europe and the United States, and began securing leasing rights for many of Norwegian's former Boeing 787s.

The partnership was to take advantage of each airline having substantial pre-existing presence at New York JFK, Boston, and Fort Lauderdale airports.

[71] During an interview with The Wall Street Journal in July 2014, Bjørn Kjos hinted at buying 20 more 787-9s, with deliveries from 2018, though the airline had refused to confirm this order plan.

[27][73] The airline's Dreamliners were initially registered in Ireland and the Civil Aviation Authority of Norway had given Norwegian Air Shuttle a temporary exemption to operate foreign-registered aircraft.

[76] From the airline's start-up in May 2013, 73 of 97 New York and Bangkok arrivals to Oslo were delayed through September 2013[77] and two of the aircraft were later grounded due to technical issues.

[80][81][82] The airline's replies to the criticism varied from deep apologies[83] to neglect and blaming of the aircraft manufacturer and maintenance sub-contractors.

[102] Throughout different points in Norwegian Long Haul's history from the launch of its long-haul services in 2013 and through to 2019, Norwegian had wet-leased aircraft on demand from various charter operators when it had an insufficient amount of operational or spare Boeing 787s to carry out its intended flight schedule, whether from delivery delays, issues with the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines on its fleet, or other incidents that rendered portions of its fleet out of service when needed.

[110] A spokesperson for Norwegian added that the airline scaled back its operations to eliminate the need to wet-lease aircraft by the winter 2019-2020 season.

Norwegian wet-leased two Airbus A340-300s from Hi Fly (including the one pictured) to launch its planned long-haul services in May 2013, due to delays in the delivery of its first Boeing 787 Dreamliners .
EI-LNA (later LN-LNA) was Norwegian's first Boeing 787-8 , originally delivered on 28 June 2013.
Norwegian ordered its first of the larger Boeing 787-9 variant in December 2013. The aircraft pictured, EI-LNI (later LN-LNI), was Norwegian's first 787-9 and was delivered on 24 February 2016.
A Norwegian Long Haul Boeing 787-8 .
Norwegian particularly between 2017 and 2019 wet-leased aircraft, such as Airbus A330s from Wamos Air similar to the one pictured, to operate its long-haul flights during periods when some of its Boeing 787s were out of service.