Due to high demand, Lufthansa is putting the world’s largest passenger aircraft back into service. The A380 was phased out three years ago because it was considered too big and too expensive. And in the pandemic, there was no demand.
It’s too big and too expensive. With these arguments, Lufthansa put its A380 planes in the hangar in September 2021, at the height of the pandemic. The last machine used carried 449 passengers from Bangkok to Frankfurt. It was part of a fleet of 14 aircraft of this type that Lufthansa put into service between 2010 and 2015.
On Thursday, for the first time in three years, a Lufthansa A380 will take off again: It will take off from Munich to Boston, and from July there will be another connection to JFK Airport in New York. The offer will change in the fall: “Flights to Bangkok and Los Angeles are planned with the winter flight schedule,” said Lufthansa spokeswoman Bettina Rittberger in an interview tagesschau.de.
Lufthansa plans to use A380s by 2027
The A380 should remain in service for a few years: “We plan to use the A380 until 2027,” explained Rittberger. Lufthansa is currently waiting for various aircraft that have not yet been delivered. Delivery bottlenecks would delay this.
The entire A380 fleet will be stationed in Munich. For the time being, four A380s and two in reserve will be reactivated. Another two remain on the ground. It has not yet been decided whether they will also be reactivated.
Giant planes despite the climate crisis and austerity?
A giant plane in times of austerity and climate crisis? Lufthansa does not provide any information on the costs of putting the aircraft back into service. “We looked at the numbers very carefully and decided positively; the A380 pays off.” The A340-600 currently flies to New York, but the A380 has 80 percent more seats. And it should fly more environmentally friendly, at least compared to the smaller aircraft currently in use: “The A380 uses 20 percent less kerosene and therefore CO2,” says Rittberger. Currently, guests would book the machine separately. The demand pressure is high.
Lufthansa was the third largest A380 customer with 14 aircraft, after Emirates and Singapore Airlines. Airbus had taken back six of these due to contractual obligations. Eight are in long-term parking mode and are in the hangar. In Corona times there was no need for them. In addition, the aircraft was considered too big and too expensive anyway. They should be reactivated in the event of an “unexpectedly rapid market recovery”.
Other airlines had also turned their backs on the A380 in the past, at least in part: Emirates, the largest Airbus customer with 123 aircraft on order, had reduced its orders. As a result, Airbus announced in 2019 that it would stop production; the order backlog had become too small.
Last summer the time had come – demand increased, additionally flanked by delivery bottlenecks at Airbus and Boeing for other machines. There was a lack of ordered but not yet delivered aircraft. “Every plane on the ground hurts,” said Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr recently.
50,000 additional passengers in summer
The capacities are now urgently needed: 509 passengers can be accommodated in an A380. According to Lufthansa, 50,000 additional passengers could be carried this summer when the giant aircraft are back in service, Rittberger confirms earlier information from the company. In the coming year, at least one million additional passengers are to be carried in the A380, to whom Lufthansa would otherwise not have been able to offer flights, according to Rittberger. “We now have the growth.”
According to the company, it has not yet been decided what Lufthansa will do with the giant jumbos after 2027. The A380 flew for the first time in April 2005, and the first scheduled flight took off in 2007 – a Singapore Airlines machine that was delivered a year and a half late.