by Lufthansa Flyer | Feb 3, 2017 | Eurowings, Featured, LCC, Munich, Passenger Experience |
Beginning in Summer 2018, Lufthansa’s low cost carrier, Eurowings, will begin serving Frankfurt as the LH Group seeks to stem the competition coming from other European LCCs.
In an article published in Airliners.de, Eurowings boss Karl Ulrich Garnadt stated that due to the pressures seen coming from Ryanair and others, it made good business sense to counter the new competition. Ryanair plans to begin service to Frankfurt this spring.
Such a move is made easier due to the fact that Eurowings will inherit 33 aircraft in the coming months after Lufthansa agreed to lease the aircraft from Air Berlin. This is of course in addition to the aircraft that will join Eurowings after the acquisition of Brussels Airlines closes. In all, the Eurowings fleet will grow to nearly 120 aircraft making it easier to operate from large hubs and to take on their competitors directly.
Previously, Eurowings announced that it will begin flying from Lufthansa’s other Mega-Hub in Munich in March. The initial timetable calls for flights to 32 cities throughout Europe, mostly towards ‘Holiday’ type destinations.
by Lufthansa Flyer | Feb 1, 2017 | Featured, Swiss |
Earlier today, SWISS flight LX40 operating from Zurich to Los Angeles suffered an engine problem that required the shut down of the engine and an emergency diversion to a nearby airport. The aircraft flying to route was one of their newer 777 aircraft, tail number HB-JND.
The plane landed safely at Iqaluit Airport (YFB) after traveling nearly 3000 miles from Zurich. There is no immediate time frame for the continuation of the flight. The airport’s main runway was closed for nearly an hour after the aircraft arrived.
There actually was someone at the airport able to catch the emergency landing.
The following video is from Twitter user @Tattuinee who captured the moment the 777 landed.
Now being towed safely to the apron:
Iqaluit is in the Nunavut region of Canada near the entrance to Hudson Bay, and not far from Santa’s workshop in the North pole.
Santa’s Workshop is just a quick dog sled trip away…
A quick decision was made to divert. Graphic courtesy of FlightRadar24.com.
As luck would have it (for me at least), I have a friend who is on this flight so I expect hear all about his adventure in this remote outpost. If there’s anything interesting to share, I’ll follow up with another post.
UPDATE: Swiss has sent an aircraft from New York to pick up stranded passengers and take then onward to Los Angeles.
by Lufthansa Flyer | Feb 1, 2017 | Etihad, Featured, Lufthansa |
As I mentioned last night, a press conference was held this morning in Abu Dhabi between by the leadership of Lufthansa and Etihad Airways as they announced an expansion of their relationship.
If you remember from yesterday, I wrote about Lufthansa assisting Etihad’s MRO operations as well as Lufthansa’s LSG Skychefs catering business to start providing catering for Etihad flights. Here are additional details:
The deal for the aircraft maintenance and catering is worth $100 million. The catering part of the agreement includes a 4 year contract by which Lufthansa will provide all of the catering services for Etihad flights in 16 cities through Europe, the Americas, and Asia. LSG Skychefs will be Etihad’s largest supplier of on board catering outside of Abu Dhabi (Etihad’s home base).
The MRO part of the deal includes a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ that will see Lufthansa Technik and Etihad work as a team to provide a variety of maintenance services to Etihad’s fleet as well as Etihad’s partner airlines such as Alitalia and Air Berlin.
Also part of today’s announcement was the fact that there will be expansions to this relationship as time goes on. It was noted that there may be additional agreements covering passenger services and cargo.
A new part of their cooperation that was announced today stated that Etihad will move its operations in Munich and Frankfurt to terminals where Lufthansa flights operate from. For Munich, this means no longer will Etihad have to suffer in the dreary Terminal 1. They’ll be moving their operations to Terminal 2 and Satellite Terminal 2. In Frankfurt, this means that Etihad will now fly from Terminal 1, whereas perviously they were operating out of Terminal 2.
This makes all the sense in the world because of the new codeshare arrangements that have been created between Etihad and Lufthansa. It would make for bad logistics if passengers had to travel between terminals and go through multiple security checks to get to their codeshare flights.
And no, there was no announcement about Etihad joining Star Alliance.
