Air Nostrum

You are standing in Madrid or on Mallorca, an aircraft in Iberia colors taxis up – and it is not an Airbus but a long, slender regional jet or a turboprop. Then you very likely have Air Nostrum in front of your lens. The airline from Valencia has flown as Iberia Regional for decades and is thus one of the cases where the brand and the operating airline are two different things. Here you learn how to attribute Air Nostrum correctly.

Air Nostrum at a glance

Air Nostrum is a Spanish regional airline headquartered in Quart de Poblet, right next to Valencia Airport. Its full name is Air Nostrum Líneas Aéreas del Mediterráneo – the “Mediterráneo” gives away its origin on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. The company was founded in May 1994 and began flight operations in December of the same year.

The switch for everything that followed was set in 1997: since May, Air Nostrum has flown as a franchise partner of Iberia and is connected through it to the oneworld alliance. Since then Iberia sells the flights under its own flight number, and Air Nostrum flies them under the Iberia Regional brand. The principle has stayed the same to this day: Air Nostrum takes over routes where larger aircraft are not worthwhile or where many frequencies are in demand – typical examples are domestic connections between smaller cities, flights between the Balearic Islands and connections from Melilla to the mainland.

In recent years this role has rather grown. Within the International Airlines Group, Iberia is concentrating more on medium- and long-haul and handing low-demand domestic routes to regional partners. One example from spring 2026: according to the trade press, the Madrid–Asturias route was served entirely with Air Nostrum aircraft in March.

By its own account, Air Nostrum connects about 60 airports in nine countries in Europe and North Africa. Besides scheduled service, the airline offers charter flights and leases aircraft with or without crew to other airlines – the principle is explained in the article Wet lease explained. The maintenance operation ANEM (Air Nostrum Engineering and Maintenance) also takes on third-party work.

Codes, flight numbers and callsign

At Air Nostrum it pays to look closely at the codes, because two airlines come together here:

• IATA code YW: Air Nostrum’s own code. You mostly see it on charter flights or in industry databases.
• Iberia flight numbers IB8xxx: the Iberia Regional flights are sold under these numbers. If the departure board shows an Iberia flight with a number from 8000 up, Air Nostrum is almost always behind it.
• ICAO code ANE: appears in the air traffic control flight plan and on many flight trackers.
• Callsign AIR NOSTRUM: this is how the crew identifies itself on the radio.

This principle is related to a codeshare, but not the same: with a franchise, the partner flies permanently under the big brand’s image. How codeshares work in general is explained in the article Codeshare flights explained.

The fleet: CRJ1000 and ATR 72-600

The fleet is now reduced to two types. According to a trade report from June 2026, it consisted of 38 aircraft with an average age of about 11.5 years. In summer 2026 Air Nostrum additionally took over two CRJ1000s from CityJet, which had previously been flying on wet lease for SAS and now fly with Spanish registrations.

Type	Number (mid-2026)	Seats	Role	Spotter note
Bombardier CRJ1000	31, then two more from CityJet	100	Backbone of the fleet on domestic and island routes	Longest type in the CRJ family, rear-mounted engines
ATR 72-600	7	72	Short routes with lower demand	Turboprop with a high-mounted wing

The Bombardier CRJ1000 is the workhorse. With 100 seats it is the largest version of the CRJ family from Bombardier and ideal for Air Nostrum: enough capacity for routes from Madrid or Barcelona to the regions, but much smaller than an Airbus of the A320 family. The ATR 72-600 from ATR takes over shorter connections where a turboprop is more economical to fly than a jet.

What happens next with the fleet is open. According to the trade press, Air Nostrum is examining whether the CRJ1000s will fly longer with major maintenance programs or be replaced by a new generation. The Embraer E2 family such as the E195-E2 and the Airbus A220 are named as candidates; no decision had been made by mid-2026. A special case is the Airlander 10 airship from Hybrid Air Vehicles, for which Air Nostrum reserved ten units in 2022 and doubled the reservation to twenty in 2023. Whether and when this becomes scheduled service is not foreseeable.

Historic fleet: from the Fokker 50 to the CRJ900

If you go through older spotter photos from Spain, you find a surprisingly colorful list of types at Air Nostrum. The fleet that is so uniform today only came about over the years:

Type	In service	Remark
Fokker 50	1995–2006	First big turboprop type, at times 38 examples
BAe 146	1997–2007	Four-engine regional jet
ATR 42	1997–2015	Small turboprop fleet of three aircraft
Bombardier CRJ200	1998–2025	Up to 37 aircraft, long the backbone
De Havilland Canada Dash 8	2001–2011	Turboprop, up to 19 aircraft
Bombardier CRJ900	2005–2022	Up to 14 aircraft

Types like the Fokker 50 from Fokker or the Dash 8 from De Havilland Canada are long gone. The CRJ200 in particular shaped the image of Iberia Regional for two decades. In the pandemic year 2020, Air Nostrum announced it would shrink the fleet significantly; at that point it still consisted of 49 aircraft, including CRJ100/200s and CRJ900s. In the following years the CRJ900s disappeared first, and the last CRJ200s followed in 2025. Photos of these types in Air Nostrum or Iberia Regional colors are therefore historic – a nice find when you sort through old archives.

Group: CityJet and SARA

Air Nostrum is privately held by entrepreneurs from the Valencia region. In July 2018, Air Nostrum and Ireland’s CityJet announced they would merge under a common holding company. The merger was completed in October 2023: the new group is called SARA (Strategic Alliance of Regional Airlines), and the shareholders of Air Nostrum hold the majority. Both airlines continue to operate under their own names.

For spotters this is visible mainly in fleet movements – for example in the two CityJet CRJ1000s that moved to the Spanish register in 2026. Conversely, Air Nostrum has at times flown for other companies: from late 2018 it operated flights for Brussels Airlines on wet lease. Earlier, partners such as Air Nostrum’s Irish subsidiary Hibernian and Malta’s Medavia also helped out on Iberia Regional flights; in 2020 the airline announced it would operate these flights with its own aircraft only from then on.

Outside aviation, Air Nostrum also holds a stake in Iryo, a private high-speed rail operator that has been running in Spain since November 2022.

How to recognize Air Nostrum

The aircraft wear the Iberia livery: white fuselage and the red-and-yellow tail with the Iberia symbol. The Air Nostrum name, by contrast, recedes into the background. That means the tail alone is not a distinguishing feature – if you sort Iberia photos only by the tail, you easily lump Air Nostrum, Iberia Express and Iberia together.

The real identifying features are therefore type, registration and code:

Between the two current types the distinction is easy: the CRJ1000 is a jet with two engines at the rear of the fuselage and a T-tail, the ATR 72-600 is a high-wing aircraft with two propellers on the wing and also a T-tail. It gets harder when you want to tell CRJ variants apart from each other. You can find tips in the article Recognizing regional jets, and for propeller aircraft in the guide Telling the ATR and Dash 8 apart.

Spotting Air Nostrum

Your best chances are at the big bases. In Valencia Air Nostrum is at home and clearly shapes the traffic. In Madrid and Barcelona the regional jets mingle with the dense Iberia, Vueling and Air Europa traffic – here the CRJ1000 in the Iberia look is a good contrast to the many Airbus jets. Good starting points are La Muñoza in Madrid and the Mirador at Barcelona Airport; more background comes from the guides to Madrid-Barajas and Barcelona.

The Balearic Islands have a charm of their own. Because Air Nostrum flies the connections between the islands, you see the aircraft in Palma de Mallorca as well as in Ibiza and Menorca. In summer they meet masses of leisure airlines from all over Europe there – plan your day with the guide Plane spotting in Mallorca. Add to that regional airports on the mainland such as Bilbao or Seville, where Air Nostrum maintains bases.

If you are spotting in Spain for the first time, you should know the local rules of the game. What is allowed and where you should be careful is summarized in the article Spotting in Spain. And if you want to place Air Nostrum in a European comparison, the overview Regional airlines in Europe helps.

Air Nostrum in the Spanish market

In Spanish air transport, Air Nostrum fills a clear niche. Iberia flies the big domestic and European routes with Airbus and the long-haul from Madrid, Iberia Express takes over short- and medium-haul with the A320 family, and Air Nostrum serves the regions below that. Competition comes from Vueling from Barcelona, Air Europa and Volotea, which connects many smaller cities directly. In the Canary Islands, Binter Canarias plays a similar role with its own turboprops as Air Nostrum does between the Balearic Islands.

For the industry Air Nostrum is an established name: the airline has been honored several times by the European Regions Airline Association (ERA) and was named Regional Airline of the Year by Air Transport World in 2011. Through the pandemic, however, it had to cut back fleet and costs significantly and received support in 2022 through SEPI, the Spanish state rescue fund.

Common mix-ups

• Thinking Iberia colors mean Iberia – Air Nostrum flies in the Iberia look, recognizable by the regional jet or turboprop.
• Confusing Air Nostrum with Iberia Express – both look similar, but Iberia Express flies Airbus jets exclusively.
• Looking for YW on the departure board – most flights run as IB8xxx, the airline’s own code YW hardly appears.
• Logging a CRJ1000 as a CRJ900 – Air Nostrum has had no CRJ900s since 2022; registration and tracker type bring clarity.
• Misattributing ex-CityJet aircraft – the CRJ1000s taken over now fly with EC- registrations for Air Nostrum, no longer for CityJet.
• Confusing the ATR 72-600 with the Dash 8 – the ATR has its landing gear in fuselage fairings, the Dash 8 in the engine nacelles.

Conclusion

Air Nostrum is the airline you constantly see at Spanish airports – just mostly under the wrong name. Behind Iberia Regional is an independent company from Valencia with its own code, its own fleet and a long history of types from the Fokker 50 to the CRJ1000. If you pay attention to type, EC- registration and the ICAO code ANE, you attribute every sighting correctly.