The already troubled European airline industry is facing yet more disruptions after pilots working for German carrier Lufthansa voted in favour of their largest strike in almost a decade in reaction to ongoing job security.
Of the airline’s pilots, a staggering 93 percent said yes to the strike, which is scheduled to begin on Monday. All of the pilots will be asked to participate in the strike which will have massive consequences given Lufthansa is one of the ‘big three’ airlines in Europe along with British Airways and France-KLM.
Management has accepted full responsibility for the action, which dates back to acrimonious [...]

Lufthansa is now going to become the first major European carrier in 20 years to launch services to Baghdad. The German carrier says that it is planning to fly to the Iraqi capital and Erbil in the north from Frankfurt and Munich come this summer. Adding these new services was said to be brought on due to high demand.
A spokesman at Lufthansa, Boris Ogursky, said that the demand goes in both directions right now. He confirmed that a start date for this new service should be around mid 2010. However, he noted that it is still way too soon to [...]

The well know German carrier Lufthansa has flew 2.6 percent less passengers in 2009 than in 2008. To match this slight decline in overall passengers, capacity has also been reduced by the airline by 1.3 percent over the course of the year.
Almost 55.6 million passengers flew with Lufthansa in 2009. All regions did report a drop in traffic, except for the Middle East and Africa. Revenue seat kilometers fell by 2.4 percent as well. Lufthansa continues to grow its routes to the Middle East. The latest announcement reveals plans for flights to Baghdad from Frankfurt and Munich.
Lufthansa said that, as [...]

Lufthansa’s deputy and CEO, Christoph Franz, has just recently revealed that Lufthansa will overhaul its European economy class product next year in a bid to cut costs. The main development is that passengers will see their seat pitch reduced. This will be done so that the German national carrier can put more passengers on every flight, thus being able to reduce ticket prices.
Many airline experts point out that Lufthansa is being forced to make these changes to fit more passengers on planes in order to keep ticket prices low. Right now most airlines are losing a lot of money, because [...]

Lufthansa has just recently reported, as of October 29th, that they had a net loss of almost €32 million for the first nine months of this year. This news comes despite the fact that the airline posted a profit of €226 million between January and September of 2009. The carrier said that it was left in the red due to weak demand and the overall recession.
The big decline in the number of business travelers played a major roll in the losses. However, other factors, like the fall in yield, also played a roll in the big loss. During the same [...]

It now seems that the national carrier of Germany, Lufthansa, has reported a drop in its passengers of 3.9 percent for the first nine months of 2009. The carrier goes on to blame the global recession, which has had a death grip on the airline industry since the start.
So far, the airline has been able to carry 41.9 million passengers when capacity had been cut by 1.9 percent. The revenue per seat is also down by 3.8 percent. Thus, during the first nine months, the load factor on the planes fell by 1.5 percent.
The carrier said that passenger numbers actually [...]

It now seems that Flybe, a well known carrier, has now entered the race to buy up BMI from Lufthansa. It seems that Flybe may be trying to make a new joint bid with British Airways. As of right now, it is understood that Flybe has registered its interest in trying to buy BMI, but the possibility of British Airways and Flybe making a joint bid has still yet to be talked about.
If Flybe is able to make a successful bid, this should avoid problems with the competition watchdogs. At the same time, it would also stop other people from [...]

Lufthansa is set to cut about 15 percent of its managerial staff by 2012. The German national carrier confirmed this report and said that the losses would be better than more enforced redundancies.
This is part of the airline’s Climb 2011 program. This was a program that was announced back in July of this year to cut €1 billion in costs from its operations. This included cutting up to 20 percent of its workforce.
The Climb 2011 project was announced just after Lufthansa announced a €8 million profit for the first six months of 2009. This is just €669 million less than [...]

It now seems that the German carrier, Lufthansa, is setting its sights on finding an early solution to its problems. This comes in the form of Lufthansa aiming for an agreement with SAS to take over the 20 percent stake it still holds in bmi. Lufthansa is hoping the take over will bee possible by the end of the year.
This plan comes at a good time, since the funds have been running low for the Scandinavian carrier SAS, and they are thinking to sell its holdings in bmi anyway. One of the Lufthansa management board members, Stefan Lauer, said that [...]

After the big Bmi takeover, Lufthansa is now looking at a 13.4 percent year on year rise in passenger traffic for August. The carrier went on to say that last month’s seat sales had actually risen 9 percent on 2008, but only by 2.1 percent if the figures of the British carrier were not included. Thus, the successful takeover of Bmi has helped Lufthansa find growth.
Lufthansa went on to say that a 14 percent year on year jump in European capacity, due to the consolidation of Bmi, had been met by a 19.2 percent increase in demand. Of course, these [...]