SunExpress, a joint venture of Turkey's flag carrier Turkish Airlines (THY) and Germany's Lufthansa, launched yesterday the first-ever direct flights between Turkey's central province of Konya and the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

Planned to fly once a week until Sept. 26, the flights will take off every Wednesday from Konya and every Thursday from Oslo, the company said in a statement.

"We are pleased with the developments we have seen in Oslo in recent years," said Peter Glade, the commercial director of SunExpress.

"With the addition of Konya, we have more than doubled our capacity for the summer of 2019. Even though our flights are limited to the summer season alone, we are considering the idea of expanding our flights from Oslo to Antalya and İzmir. The only thing we lack here is to find tour operators to support us during the winter months," he said.

The carrier said that with the vision of creating an air bridge between Turkey and Europe, it offers a record capacity of 6.6 million seats from Central Europe to Turkey in 2019. Officials added that the company will operate direct flights to 36 destinations in Europe from 16 cities in Turkey.

The carrier, which connects Turkey's holiday resort and its hub, Antalya, with the most international destinations with direct scheduled flights, is now also offering the most number of seats in the company's history to the city. The city will be served with 3.7 million seats during the summer of this year.

As part of the summer season flights, the carrier has started direct scheduled flights from Antalya to Europe's most popular destinations, including Oslo, Eindhoven and Gothenburg, and has recently added Prague to its flight network.

It will also launch flights to the German city of Friedrichshafen on Aug. 5, in addition to other new destinations. In domestic lines, SunExpress offers direct flights to Adana, İzmir, Diyarbakır, Gaziantep, Kayseri, Samsun, Trabzon and Van from Antalya. Besides Konya-Oslo, its new routes this summer from Anatolia will be Düsseldorf-Malatya, Düsseldorf-Kütahya/Zafer, Cologne-Samsun, Stuttgart-Diyarbakir and Stuttgart-Konya.