Thanks for a great response!
I remember that the Lufthansa Express concept was the operation of 28 aircraft (B737 and A310 I think) on purely domestic services within Germany with operations starting in October 1992.
Would have been A300-600 as well, I flew on at least two A300s with the ‘Express’ titling in 1995-96.
Flight Crews were hired and some crews transfered from Lufthansa with lower salaries payed.
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All aircraft were operated independently from mainline Lufthansa and Lufthansa hoped to generate cost-savings through higher utilisation and lower paid crews.
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This did not come to fruition and Lufthansa Express was re-introduced into Lufthansa 1994 I think with all employees transfered to Lufthansa.
Did not know this. Was Lufthansa Express a separately registered company (seeing that the crews apparently were hired with new contracts)?
The suspension of this domestic project would explain why ‘Express’ aircraft were seen all over Europe later. I flew FRA-LHR-FRA with an Express A300 in 1996.
Later Lufthansa discussed another version of a low-cost subsidiary with the working-title “Lufthansa Lite”.
These plans were abandoned but through the take-over of eurowings Lufthansa took the A319´s of eurowings to form germanwings (using the name “German Wings” bought after the deminse of this MD-80-operator) to have their own low cost adventure.
So Eurowings does not have any A319s anymore? Did not know this either… Is Germanwings considered a success by Lufthansa management and the travel industry in Germany? I flew on Germanwings last week and was very satisfied, although it was an ex-LH A319 I was on.
Thanks a lot for your info IberiaMD-87! If you can dig out more info I’d be very grateful!
Grüßi
Hans J
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