Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr confirms plans to found a new airline. It should be active on short and medium-haul routes from 2023 and be similar to Cityline.
It had already leaked out: In an effort to reduce staff costs in the cockpit, Lufthansa is working on setting up a new airline. It is intended for short and medium-haul traffic to the hubs in Frankfurt and Munich. The unions The Cockpit and UFO association have already criticized the plans of the German aviation group.
Now Lufthansa has expressed itself for the first time. CEO Carsten Spohr said at the annual press conference on Thursday (March 3) that the new airline – “I call it a kind of second city line” – should start operations next spring. It serves multiple purposes. On the one hand, 250 Germanwings captains would be accommodated there.
Fight against cost pressures
“Secondly, we have a collective agreement with the Cockpit Association that would no longer allow Cityline to operate aircraft with more than 75 seats from 2026, so we offer Cityline employees a perspective,” says Spohr. Third, you have to counter the cost pressure at the Frankfurt and Munich hubs and “become cheaper overall” by changing your own group fleet mix in favor of “airlines with rather good unit costs”.
Spohr also commented on the targeted size. With 250 captains, Lufthansa Cityline can be used as a model for the size of the new subsidiary, said the Lufthansa boss. “That would bring us to 40 aircraft.” In the first step, however, this cannot be done, and the cockpit staff could also switch to the main airline Lufthansa at a certain seniority.
No separation of short and long distances
“In terms of collective bargaining, the new airline will be exactly where Cityline is today,” said Spohr. “We want to apply the Cityline collective agreements. The colleagues who switch from Germanwings keep their Germanwings conditions.
The CEO denied that Lufthansa wanted to separate the short and medium-haul business from the long-haul division with the new airline. “Of course, the Lufthansa airline will continue to do both in the future, short and long-haul,” said Spohr.