Shannon airport could see an additional 100 extra military flights every month with news that Omni Air International will extend its services through the midwest airport from May.
The news will be a significant boost to the airport after the biggest carrier of US military personnel for the Pentagon pulled out last year.
World Airways shifted its military technical stops to Leipzig, Germany, on July 1st, 2006, citing economic reasons.
With the loss of World Airways last year, there has been a big drop in US military traffic at Shannon.
Figures released by Shannon airport have confirmed that almost 15,000 more troops passed through the airport in January 2006 than in the first three months of this year combined.
In the first quarter of this year, 26,817 troops stopped off at Shannon on 268 flights. This is a major drop on the figure for 2006 when, during the same period, 116,450 military personnel on 743 flights passed through the airport.
As a result of the pull-out by World Airways, the airport has lost millions of euro and hundreds of flights.
Shannon has earned an estimated €8 million a year for the past six years from US military flights and its much-publicised losses would be far greater if it did not have the military business.
The start of Omni Air International's programme for the Pentagon through Shannon airport could see an extra 100 flights every month carrying at least 10,000 troops.
The airline operates a fleet of DC-10-30s and Boeing 757-200s and has its headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Dublin Airport Authority, which still runs Shannon, has already warned that the airport should not rely on the military transit traffic.
The airport authority's chief executive Declan Collier has already said that Shannon airport's losses are "only slightly camouflaged by the military transit traffic, which is not a sustainable business".
A total of 280,785 soldiers passed through the airport in 2006 compared to 340,688 the previous year.
Last October, the number of troops to have transited Shannon since the September 11th attacks in New York in 2001 topped the one million mark.
A spokesperson for Shannon airport said: "Omni Air are an existing customer and they are putting a programme of flights through here starting next month."
Omni Air unwittingly found itself at the centre of an international controversy in June 2005 when a man was spotted in handcuffs on one of its aircraft at Shannon.
A row erupted over whether the prisoner was a victim of the United States' controversial rendition operations, whereby alleged suspects in the "war against terror" are transported for interrogation, which has caused concern to human rights groups.
It later emerged, however, that the "prisoner" was a member of the US military who was in custody for an ordinary offence - stealing clothing - and was being repatriated to serve his sentence in the US.