Widebody jet reactivated: First Lufthansa A380 landed in Frankfurt again

Widebody reactivated
First Lufthansa A380 landed in Frankfurt again

A production bottleneck at the manufacturer Boeing puts the wide-body jet A380 back in the limelight at Lufthansa. The airline is reactivating several of the jets to meet demand for long-haul tickets.

Lufthansa’s first A380 wide-bodied jet has landed at Frankfurt Airport and is scheduled to be reactivated next summer. The machine came on Friday evening from Teruel, Spain, where it had been parked permanently after the corona shock on May 5, 2020. As confirmed by Lufthansa, the entire flight had to be completed with the landing gear down because a mandatory test before folding cannot be carried out in Teruel.

The nine-year-old machine with the identifier D-AIMK and the baptismal name “Düsseldorf” is the first of four or five machines that the group wants to reactivate because of the great demand for tickets. Originally, Lufthansa once had 14 examples of the largest passenger aircraft in the world. Lufthansa needs the giant jets, each with 509 seats, that were sorted out before Corona because the US manufacturer Boeing has postponed the delivery of new long-haul aircraft.

On the other hand, the demand for long-haul tickets has recently risen sharply – especially in the more expensive classes, for which a particularly large number of seats are offered in the A380. It means a “considerable effort” to reintroduce the A380, said a Lufthansa spokesman. “The bottom line is that it’s much faster than ordering new aircraft.”

After the hail-damaged outer skin has been repaired and further basic work done in the Frankfurt A380 hangar, the aircraft is then sent to Lufthansa Technik in Manila for a longer maintenance interval. Lufthansa chose Munich Airport as the base of operations because there are more pilots with a license for the smaller A350 based there. The license can be extended to the A380 in a short time.

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