As part of my trip to Hong Kong, I built in a day in Frankfurt in order to meet with a few of my contacts and friends at Lufthansa as well as to take advantage of plane spotting at the airport. I had arrived from Washington DC at 5:30a and had a full day in FRA before flying to Munich and onward to Hong Kong later that evening.
A good portion of my day was spent with my friend Uli who had arranged “behind the fence” access for us in order to get up close and personal to part of Lufthansa’s fleet. During the course of several hours, I managed to take over 400 photos from a variety locations.
To keep things organized, I will break up my day of plane spotting into 3 parts. Part I captures primarily long-haul aircraft parked around Lufthansa’s Technic hangars. Part II will take you into the A380 hangar for an up-close look at D-AIMD aka ‘Tokio’. Part III will focus on departing Lufthansa Aircraft and Part IV will look at non-Lufthansa traffic at the airport.
On to the pictures (All taken with a Nikon D7100 / Nikon 16-85 3.5:5.6 ED lens):
A330-300 D-AIKI was delivered in September 2005 and is the 4000th aircraft produced by Airbus
Airbus A330-300 D-AIKE joined the fleet in December 2004 and is nicknamed ‘Landshut’
Boeing 747-400 D-ABVN was built in May 1992 and is known as “Dortmund”
This Boeing 737-500 serves as a training aircraft for Lufthansa Technic’s Mechanics.
Airbus A340-300 ‘D-AIGP’ was completed in December 1998 and is nicknamed ‘Paderborn’
Airbus A340-300 ‘D-AIGX’ joined the fleet in September 2009 and is named ‘Duren’
Boeing 747-400 ‘D-ABVU’ joined the fleet in December 1998 and is nicknamed ‘Bayern’
Boeing 747-400 ‘D-ABVP’ joined the fleet in February 1997 and is named ‘Bremen’.
Airbus A340-600 ‘D-AIHE’ joined the fleet in January 2004 and is named ‘Leverkusen’. Here it’s pictured while having one of it’s Rolls Royce engines “Run Up”.
Then as if by divine intervention, I turn the corner around one the Technik hangars, and there sits my favorite Lufthansa aircraft, the Boeing 747-8i. This one happens to be the first one, D-ABYA or ‘Brandenburg’. I had the opportunity to attend the festivities celebrating her inaugural flight in June 2012 and had the pleasure of flying aboard ‘D-ABYA’ from Frankfurt to Washington DC on her 3rd ever departure from Frankfurt a few days later. For those of you wondering why I didn’t fly on the inaugural, I decided to visit family in Slovakia as part of my trip which also gave me the opportunity to photograph the inaugural ‘taxi’ and ‘takeoff’.
The 747-8i……
Boeing 747-8i ‘D-ABYA’ joined the fleet in May 2012 and is named “Brandenburg”. She is seen here being ventilated before flying to Hong Kong later that evening. I would see her the next morning over the Himalayas from my A330 from Munich.
The beauty and art of engineering……
She looks great for being 1 year old!!
