At about 20:06 on Sunday 27 September 2026, the little radar on my desk picked up an aircraft at 36,000 feet. The label read Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner, registration LN-LNO, route ATH→JFK, callsign NBT50E. Athens to New York, in other words, and it was the registration that made me look it up.

Who Norse Atlantic is

Norse Atlantic Airways is a Norwegian long-haul, low-cost airline. It was founded in February 2021, is headquartered in Arendal in southern Norway, and began flying on 14 June 2022 with Oslo to New York JFK. It flies Boeing 787-9s and leases them rather than owning them: AerCap and BOC Aviation are the lessors named when the fleet was put together, and the aircraft register lists AerCap Ireland as the owner of LN-LNO.

The codes are worth knowing if you watch trackers. Norse's IATA code is N0, its ICAO code is NBT, and its radio callsign is "Longship". That is why the callsign on my screen starts NBT: aircraft broadcast the three-letter ICAO prefix, not the two-character code you see on a ticket.

Athens to New York

Athens to JFK was Norse's first scheduled service from Athens. It began on 30 May 2024 with the 787-9, and it has run as a seasonal route since then, so a flight in late September is well inside the season. I can say what the screen showed on 27 September and no more: I haven't found a published schedule for this winter, so I won't guess at when it stops.

One registration, two tails

LN-LNO has a past. Before Norse, it flew for Norwegian, which painted a "tail fin hero" on its aircraft: a portrait of a notable person, with the name beside it. Norwegian introduced Roald Dahl as its first British tail fin hero in September 2016, and a photograph taken at Los Angeles on 12 October 2018 shows LN-LNO in red Norwegian colours with Dahl's face on the fin.

Norse doesn't do tail heroes. Its livery is inspired by the Viking longships that crossed the North Atlantic, and its logo by the Oseberg ship. What it does instead is name its 787s after national parks, in the countries where it has bases: Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dartmoor is one of them (LN-FND), and Everglades is another (LN-FNC).

Raet

When LN-LNO was first painted for Norse in 2021, it was named Raet. Raet National Park lies on the coast of Agder in southern Norway, across the municipalities of Arendal, Tvedestrand and Grimstad. It was established on 16 December 2016 and covers 607 square kilometres, of which roughly 600 is water, making it one of only four marine national parks in Norway. It takes its name from the raet, a long moraine left by the retreat of a huge glacier about 12,000 years ago. Arendal, the town nearest the park, is also where Norse has its headquarters.

So one Dreamliner has gone from an author's portrait to a mostly underwater national park, without changing its registration.

One caution on the pictures. Commons has no freely usable photograph of LN-LNO in Norse colours, so the Norse images that go with this story are of sister aircraft, and are labelled as such. The one of LN-LNO itself is the Dahl-era photograph from 2018.

If you had a Dreamliner to name, which national park would you pick?

Sources