Low cost airline Jet2.com, which was established at Leeds Bradford Airport just over four years ago, has reached a major trading milestone with the announcement of its 1,500th employee, and it confirmed it was creating another 200 new jobs.

Christie Young, 25, from Bingley has become employee number 1,500 and will work as a Marketing Co-ordinator. Christie will be based at the company’s headquarters at Low Fare Finder House at Leeds Bradford airport.

Meanwhile, the airline is to launch a press and radio campaign to attract applications for cabin crew positions across all of its six UK bases. The airline, which will also be holding a series of city centre employment road shows, is looking to fill around 200 new vacancies.

Jet2.com, named ‘Best European Short-Haul Airline’ last year, has experienced exponential growth each year since it started flying in 2003, when it launched a service from Leeds Bradford to Amsterdam on a chilly February morning.

Four years ago it operated flights to just a handful of destinations from a single Yorkshire base – now, it has additional bases in Manchester, Newcastle and Blackpool, plus two more in Edinburgh, Scotland and Belfast International in Northern Ireland.

The number of destinations it serves has reached 39, while last week it carried its 10 millionth passenger – this year alone it expects to fly more than 4 million people across Europe.

Claire Flynn, Jet2.com’s HR Director said: “We’re delighted to welcome Christie to our fast-growing team and proud to have reached such a significant trading milestone in a relatively short space of time. The company has grown rapidly from day one and we’re currently going through one of the biggest expansion periods in our short history – in fact, this is the single biggest recruitment drive we’ve ever launched.”

“We have some major airline expansion plans which will shortly be announced, while our package holiday arm, Jet2holidays.com, has really made its mark and is now the biggest tour operator in the North of England. The company as a whole now employs people in more than 250 different job roles, with titles ranging from Captains and Cabin Crew to Operations Controllers and Website Developers. In fact, such is the pace of growth, that we have now launched a dedicated new website jobs.jet2.com in order to handle the sheer volume of recruitment vacancies and job requests which can top more than 50 a day,” concluded Flynn.