Avinor Brand Guidelines: Luftfartsverket’s 2003 Successor and Norway’s Airport Network

A state agency turned into a limited company.

Avinor AS is the company that runs most of Norway’s civil airports. It is wholly owned by the Norwegian state, which holds all of its shares through the Ministry of Transport, and its head office is at Bjørvika in Oslo, beside Oslo Central Station, English Wikipedia says. The minister of transport acts as the company’s general meeting, Norwegian Wikipedia adds. Abraham Foss has been chief executive since 2021, in a post once titled luftfartsdirektør, or director of civil aviation, Store norske leksikon says.

The organisation is older than its name. According to Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian national encyclopaedia, civil aviation was handled from 1920 by an aviation council within the Ministry of Defence, which became a state aviation office in 1938. In 1943 a Norwegian civil aviation board was set up in London to prepare for civilian flying in Norway after the liberation; the defence ministry office was expanded in 1945 and moved to the Ministry of Transport in 1946.

In 1947 it became a directorate, Luftfartsdirektoratet. The encyclopaedia dates its renaming as Luftfartsverket to 1978; English Wikipedia gives 1967. From 1993 Luftfartsverket was a self-financing state enterprise under the Ministry of Transport. In 2000 the regulator, Luftfartstilsynet, was split off, leaving the operating tasks behind, and on 1 January 2003 Luftfartsverket became a state-owned limited company and took the name Avinor, Store norske leksikon says.

One airport had already been given its own company. In 1997 Oslo’s old airport at Fornebu and the new airport then being built at Gardermoen were placed in a subsidiary, Oslo Lufthavn AS, which still runs Oslo Airport, English Wikipedia says.

Airports, air traffic and the duty-free shops.

Avinor’s network is spread along a long, mountainous coast. English Wikipedia counts 44 airports, fourteen of them shared with the Royal Norwegian Air Force, and three area control centres, in Bodø, Stavanger and Oslo; Store norske leksikon gives 43 airports. The company has about 3,000 employees. Its air navigation work, from tower control to approach and en-route services, sits in a separate wholly owned company, Avinor Flysikring, Norwegian Wikipedia says.

The company is meant to pay its own way. Norwegian Wikipedia says Avinor receives no fixed grants from the state; its income comes from the charges airlines pay to use airports and Norwegian-controlled airspace and from commercial business at the airports, and only a few of its airports make a surplus, which is used to support the rest. The encyclopaedia adds that its finances are tied to bonds listed on the Oslo stock exchange, whose rules for financial reporting it follows.

Shops are a large part of that income. In October 2026 Avinor awarded new duty-free contracts: Travel Retail Norway will run the shops at Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen and Trondheim, and Airport Retail Group at the regional airports, under eight-year agreements from 1 January 2028, the aviation site Hangar.no reported. According to Avinor, as Hangar.no reported, that business accounts for close to a fifth of the company’s income.

Traffic has recovered from the pandemic. Norway’s airports handled about 53 million travellers in 2025, close to the 54 million of 2019, NRK reported in January 2026, after several years in which the company’s finances were under strain. The same report listed risks the company still faces, among them changes to duty-free allowances, the cost of infrastructure for electric and hydrogen aircraft, fuel prices and fewer business trips.

How airport operators present themselves.

An airport operator has an unusual design problem: most of the people who meet its brand never think about the company at all. They read its signs. Wayfinding is the core of the identity, and operators typically commission a sign typeface, a pictogram set and a colour code for departures, arrivals, gates and exits, then apply them to everything from motorway approach signs to the backs of check-in desks. The corporate logo often sits quietly in a corner while the directions do the work.

Architecture carries the rest of the image. Operators’ own photography tends to favour terminals at dusk, when glazed façades glow against a darkening sky, long roofs read as clean lines and an apron full of parked aircraft becomes a pattern of lights. Interiors are shown as wide, calm halls rather than queues, and new piers or façades are announced with renderings long before they open.

The numbers come next. Route maps radiating from a single hub, new long-haul destinations and passenger milestones are standard material for press pages and annual reports, because traffic is what airlines, investors and local governments want to see. Alongside them sit pages on sustainability and noise: carbon programmes, noise contour maps, insulation schemes for nearby homes and community funds, often written for neighbours rather than travellers.

Finally, an airport is also a shopping centre and a lounge network. Retail, food and lounge promotions follow a lighter, more commercial register, with seasonal campaigns and partner brands, while investor reports return to a sober corporate grid of charts and tables. The operators in this series show how one company can speak in all of these voices at once: public utility, landlord, retailer and listed or state-owned business.

Haugesund, electric aircraft and a regional network.

The network changed again in late 2026. Avinor already owned the infrastructure at Haugesund Airport in western Norway, but the airport was run by a privately owned company, Lufthavndrift AS, which had been in financial difficulty for some time. Avinor bought all of its shares, and the takeover formally took effect on 1 November 2026, the Danish aviation site check-in.dk reported. Lufthavndrift continues as a wholly owned subsidiary within the Avinor group, and Avinor said it would look for a private co-owner.

The company has also been preparing for electric flight. Norwegian Wikipedia says Avinor started a project in 2017 to ready its airports for electric aircraft. In March 2025 Avinor and the regulator Luftfartstilsynet signed an agreement at Bergen Airport, Flesland, to begin test flights of electric aircraft between Bergen and Stavanger, planned to start that August, with the helicopter operator Bristow and the aircraft maker Beta Technologies, Bergens Avis reported. Norway’s national aviation strategy aims to bring the first electric aircraft onto the state-supported regional routes in 2028–2029, NRK reported in January 2026.

The company’s public face is less a single gateway than a list of places. Its website lets travellers choose among dozens of airports, from Oslo, Bergen and Trondheim to Tromsø, Kirkenes and Svalbard, each with its own page, while the corporate pages under the Avinor name cover the company, its environmental work and services for businesses at the airports.

For a design guide, Avinor shows how a state operator presents a whole national network under one name, with one airport, Oslo, carrying its own company and identity. Compare Oslo Airport, the Avinor subsidiary at Gardermoen, and Swedavia, the state airport company next door in Sweden. For this guide we use fjord navy, snow white and a tundra green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Avinor’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.