Estonian Air is aiming to survive by rapidly downsizing its operations

Estonia's national carrier has dropped its ambitions to develop extensive hub operations at Tallinn Airport and appointed Jan Palmér as the new CEO to scale down the airline's network and halt mounting losses. The small regional carrier in 2011 adopted a new network model, shifting its traditional focus on point-to-point markets to a network strategy based around feeding transfer traffic within Europe and to and from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region. The core goal was twofold: to increase the number of destina­tions and frequencies from Estonia, and to do so with a sus­tainable profit in the medium term.

To underpin Estonian Air's new strategy, the Estonian government in Dec-2011 decided to invest an additional EUR30 million in the airline, increasing its ownership from 90% to 97.34%. It also endorsed the revamp of the carrier's entire fleet of narrowbody and regional jets with Embraer E-Jets.