KLM boosts Trondheim flights

KLM is putting more room on one very specific Europe route this summer: Amsterdam to Trondheim will get up to three flights a day instead of the thinner schedule travelers usually see on secondary city pairs. The increase runs through the summer 2026 season, which KLM says lasts from March 29 to October 25, 2026. (news.klm.com, aviationweek.com) The airline plans to add about 20,000 seats on that route, which works out to a 15 percent capacity jump. On a continent where airlines often add growth by swapping in bigger planes rather than opening brand-new routes, that is a meaningful bump for one city pair. (aviationweek.com) The plane doing the work is the Embraer 195-E2, a narrow regional jet KLM Cityhopper uses across Europe. KLM has been reworking that fleet so each aircraft can carry 136 passengers by June 2026, up from the 132-seat layout used on most of the jets before. (simpleflying.com) That detail matters because Schiphol, Amsterdam’s main airport, has been under pressure on capacity for years, so airlines cannot always grow by simply adding more takeoff and landing slots. Packing four more seats into each Embraer 195-E2 gives KLM another way to squeeze extra volume out of the same network. (aviationweek.com, simpleflying.com) Trondheim is not Oslo, and that is part of why this stands out. Trondheim is Norway’s third-largest city, with more than 200,000 residents, and it mixes business travel, university traffic, and tourism tied to places like Nidaros Cathedral and the wider Trøndelag region. (trondheim.kommune.no, visitnorway.com) Norway’s airport system has also been seeing steady demand growth. Avinor, the state-owned airport operator, said 53.1 million passengers traveled through its airports in 2025, up 3.3 percent from 2024, with international traffic rising 3.8 percent. (om.avinor.no) For KLM, Trondheim is useful in another way: Amsterdam is a transfer hub, not just a destination. A passenger starting in central Norway can connect through Schiphol to KLM’s wider summer 2026 network of 164 destinations, including 96 in Europe and 68 intercontinental cities. (news.klm.com) So this is less a story about one Norwegian city suddenly booming than about how European airlines fine-tune busy summer networks. KLM is using a slightly denser regional jet, a hub built for connections, and a route with rising demand to create more seats without making a flashy long-haul announcement. (news.klm.com, aviationweek.com, simpleflying.com)