On the way to work: After a forced break of more than three years, Lufthansa is once again using the Airbus A380 in scheduled service. The inaugural flight took them to Boston. New York will be added this summer. © Hans Moritz
After a three-year forced break, Lufthansa's A380 has celebrated a re-premiere. We were there and present the concept behind it.
Airport – That's a culture of mistakes: With brass band music, gingerbread hearts and a lot of media fanfare, Lufthansa at Munich Airport revised its decision a little more than three years ago to literally send the Airbus A380, the largest passenger aircraft in the world, into the desert. The quasi undead is flying again - only one, by the end of 2024 there will even be six.
It probably wasn't even a mistake when Lufthansa decided to stop using the A2020 in 380. There was Corona – and emptiness in the sky. During the lockdown, no one could really imagine that air traffic would recover in the foreseeable future. So Lufthansa literally sent the giant plane into the desert, specifically into the Spanish one near Teruel, and in "deep storage" – not just temporarily, but in a coma, so to speak.
"Ribbon cutting" is part of first flights, in the picture on the left with chief pilot Karl Hermann Brandes and captains Raimund Müller and Martin Hoell. © Alex Tino Friedel - ATF Pictures
In the desert it is hot and dry – a good preservative. But even in Teruel you are not immune to the rigours of the weather. And so a hailstorm swept over the Airbus XXL – and left behind what many drivers have already had to get to know: lots of small dents in the sheet metal.
In 2022, Corona lost its horror and air traffic recovered faster than airport and airline managers ever dreamed of. The consequences are well known: last year's chaos of travel with mountains of stranded suitcases.
Lufthansa's Munich governor Stefan Kreuzpaintner and his chief pilot Karl Hermann Brandes had to ramp up capacities again.
But it didn't happen that quickly, not even with the A 380. She had to be "woken up" in Teruel for two weeks, speaking to be made ready to fly. Then we went to the shipyard in Frankfurt for 30 days and finally to a two-month check in Manila. And this at a time when people were still only hoping to get the giant plane full again.
On 12 April, the "D-AIMK", which had been delivered to Lufthansa in 2014, arrived at Erdinger Moos. It then had its re-premiere on Thursday – in 8:15 hours after Boston in the USA. Along with New York, this is the only Munich A380 destination in the summer flight schedule. In winter, there are flights to Los Angeles and Bangkok. The second A380 is expected in the second week of June, numbers three and four in July and October, and aircraft five and six next year.
But Lufthansa does not want to guarantee eternal life for the A380. "For the time being, we are planning until 2027," Brandes explains in an interview with our newspaper. The massive capacity of 509 seats – Brandes: "One A380 replaces two smaller long-haul aircraft" – is supported by "the fact that there are bottlenecks in take-off and landing rights at more and more airports, which reinforces the trend towards large aircraft". On the other hand, Lufthansa has ordered a number of A350-1000s, also large, but above all economical and quiet intercontinental jets.
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If the A380 remains in the fleet beyond 2027, the interior of the A<> would have to be completely rebuilt – according to the new "Allegris" concept of the Crane Line with more first and business class seats as well as new seats. "That costs a lot of money," says Brandes. But for the time being, there is a celebratory mood. You can be wrong . . . Ham