Airline «Air Montenegro»

To Montenegro ad (stylized as ToMontenegro and 2Montenegro) is the flagship airline of Montenegro, branded and operating under the name Air Montenegro (Montenegrin Cyrillic: Ер Монтенегро), a new company launched in early 2021 by the Government of Montenegro. Air Montenegro officially started its operations in June 2021.The predecessor airline of Montenegro Airlines was founded on October 24, 1994 by the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The first aircraft, a Fokker 28 Mk4000 (nicknamed «Lovchen»), was purchased almost two years later in 1996. The first commercial flight took place on May 7, 1997 at 10:30 a.m. between Podgorica and Bari, Italy. In April 2000, it became a member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). In June 2000, the first of five Fokker 100 aircraft was delivered to Podgorica Airport. The airline joined Amadeus CRS on March 5, 2003. In 2004, the pilots of Montenegro Airlines were the first in the region to receive the IIIA certificate. In August 2016, it was reported that Montenegro Airlines’ accounts were frozen after the airline failed to comply with a court order to pay debts owed to the country’s airport operator. Montenegro Airlines owes the company more than USD 15 million.

In December 2020, the Montenegrin government announced the closure and liquidation of Montenegro Airlines in the coming weeks, citing accumulated losses over several years. Shortly after, it was announced that the airline would suspend all flights from December 26, 2020, marking the end of its operations.

On December 29, 2020, Minister Mladen Bojanic announced that Montenegro Airlines will be reorganized and replaced by a new company, To Montenegro (2 Montenegro), as the new Montenegrin airline carrier. The liquidation procedure for Montenegro Airlines will cost around 50 million euros, but it is inevitable because the country’s anti-monopoly authority ruled that the law on state investment in the flagship carrier passed in 2019 was illegal, the government said in December 2021.

The new company was officially launched on March 2, 2021 by the government. In April 2021, it was reported that the Montenegrin government had made Air Montenegro the official name of the ToMontenegro project and that the airline would begin using two former Embraer-195 Montenegro Airlines aircraft. On June 10, 2021, the Minister of Economic Development of Montenegro Jakov Milatović visited neighboring Serbia, being one of the passengers on the first commercial flight of the new national airline Air Montenegro to Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade.