It is a memorable moment for the employees – and also for aircraft enthusiasts: the last Lufthansa scheduled flight with the wide-bodied aircraft A380 has landed in Frankfurt. The aircraft, which started out from Bangkok, touched down at Frankfurt Airport on Sunday after a good eleven-hour flight at 6:14 a.m., as a Lufthansa spokesman confirmed.
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On board the machine with 509 seats were 459 passengers and 24 crew members who had been waiting urgently for their flight home in times of the corona virus.
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Due to the worldwide collapse in demand in the corona crisis, Lufthansa is parking its entire fleet of 14 aircraft of this type indefinitely at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs. When and whether the A380 jets with the crane tail unit will go on a big tour again, is not foreseeable according to Lufthansa.
The company had initiated the farewell to the largest passenger aircraft in the world far before the crisis for cost reasons and had agreed to return six aircraft with Airbus a year ago. The machines are expected to return to the manufacturer in 2022 and 2023.
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A few weeks ago, Lufthansa surprisingly announced that it wanted to shut down its entire fleet of 14 planes. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, international travel traffic comes to a standstill and there is a massive drop in passenger numbers. Between March 9 and 15, for example, less than 2.4 million passengers traveled through German airports – in the comparative week in 2019, the figure was just under 4.3 million. It is expected that these numbers will continue to decrease.
The crisis could now ensure that the A380, which is popular with passengers and pilots alike, now disappears from the sky even faster than expected. “The A380 has never been the most profitable aircraft. All operators have noticed that,” said Airborne consultant Gerald Wissel. Even after the crisis, there would still be routes on which the use of such a large aircraft would pay off. “But there will definitely be fewer A380s going up than before Corona.”
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At 25,200 flight hours, this is a very young aircraft
The last A380 scheduled flight of Lufthansa for the time being was completed on Sunday by the aircraft with the identifier D-AIMM and the christening name “Delhi”. It has been in service since 2015 and is still a very young aircraft with a good 25,200 flight hours.
Overall, Lufthansa had high hopes for the A380 and made strong advertising for the start-up in early summer 2010. Thousands of spectators flocked to test starts and landings in Rheinmünster near Karlsruhe and Leipzig. “Frankfurt am Main” made its first long-haul flight with passengers to South Africa to bring the national soccer team to the World Cup. The first scheduled flight then went to Tokyo on June 11, 2010.
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