Lufthansa Group’s latest carrier Lufthansa City Airlines will launch flights on 26 June using an Airbus A320neo on the Munich-Birmingham route.
The new airline, which is being established to operate feeder flights into Lufthansa’s network from Frankfurt and Munich, will initially serve four domestic destinations – Bremen, Cologne, Dusseldorf and Hannover – in addition to Birmingham with its first aircraft.
It will then add flights to Berlin, Bordeaux and Hamburg when it introduces its second aircraft – an A319 – from 27 July.
Lufthansa City Airlines managing director Jens Fehlinger says: ”Lufthansa City Airlines is committed to successfully positioning itself in the European short and medium-haul segment from Munich and Frankfurt. A major investment in the future that will strengthen Germany as an aviation location and create numerous attractive jobs.”
The unit will begin with five A320 family jets and a further eight aircraft - a mix of A320neos and A319s – will join the fleet over the coming year. Longer term the group has ordered 40 Airbus A220-300s for the operation, deliveries of which begin in 2026.
Lufthansa City Airlines also has plans to serve Manchester this year, while it identifies Barcelona, Belgrade, Bilbao, Bucharest, Dublin, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Krakow, Oslo, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Prague, Ljubljana, Luxembourg, Lyon, Sofia, Toulouse and Zagreb as potential destinations for next year.
The unit is essentially a successor to regional feeder Lufthansa CityLine, for which scope clause restrictions means it cannot operate aircraft over 95 seats.
“Its role will be to feed our hubs, but also provide the feed we need to feed the significant growth we have for the long-range aircraft,” Lufthansa Group chief executive Carsten Spohr said during a media roundtable earlier this month at the IATA AGM in Dubai. ”We have over 100 widebodies on order, most of them will go to Lufthansa, but to feed those Lufthansa widebodies, we obviously we need the feed of today and maybe more than that in future.”
