Economy: Lufthansa plans more flights from June – Economy

Here you will find the latest business news in chronological order, with the latest news coming first.

Tuesday, May 5th, 2020, 12 noon: Lufthansa plans to offer more flights again from June. The company is preparing “a noticeable expansion of our flight schedule”, said CEO Carsten Spohr at the company’s general meeting. However, the construction is being carried out very slowly – Lufthansa does not expect it to reach the old traffic level of 2019 before 2023. Even if air traffic will recover somewhat by 2023, the airline has around 10,000 employees on board, according to Spohr. He wants to avoid layoffs, especially with new part-time models for pilots, among others.

Spohr did not provide any details about the flight schedule planned for June, according to a spokesman, which is currently still being worked on. Lufthansa currently transports less than one percent of the normal number of passengers, around 3,000 guests a day. The Group subsidiaries Austrian, Brussels Airlines and Air Dolomiti have ceased all flight operations since March. Only about 60 of the approximately 760 aircraft currently in use across the Group, many of them as freighters.

The Lufthansa boss also commented on the negotiations with the federal government on state aid amounting to around nine billion euros. He expects the talks with the federal government “to lead to a successful conclusion.” Nobody in the company “has an interest in the talks failing.” The state is expected to join Lufthansa as a shareholder with a blocking minority, i.e. a stake of more than 25 percent, and will file two mandates on the Supervisory Board. Spohr wants to prevent politics from exerting too much influence. Therefore, the loans and participation would have to be repaid “as soon as possible”.

However, Spohr made it clear that Lufthansa was “only as a group” competitive against the three major competitors in China, the USA and the Persian Gulf. In doing so, he confirmed that the group did not want to part with any of the subsidiaries, although some of them, such as Brussels Airlines and Austrian, were already in trouble before the Corona crisis. He also wants to stick to the second Eurowings brand, but the cheap spin-off should be organized far less complexly than in the past. Jens Flottau

Lufthansa before unusual general meeting

Tuesday, May 5, 2020, 8:45 a.m .: Lufthansa has invited its shareholders to what is probably the most unusual general meeting in history. The event will take place this Tuesday on the Internet instead of in the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt. The reason for this is the precautionary measures against the corona pandemic, which has almost brought the business of Europe’s largest aviation group, with the exception of freight, to a standstill.

Lufthansa has reduced its passenger operations to a minimum and only flies just under 1 percent of the passengers. Their daily number of guests fell from an average of 350,000 per day to around 3000. Despite massive short-time work, many fixed costs continue to run, so that, according to CEO Carsten Spohr, the company loses one million euros in cash every hour. In addition to interest rates, the kerosene contracts, which had assumed that the price of oil would be much higher than the current one, had a negative impact. The chief executive emphasized in his previously published speech that there are currently more than four billion cash reserves.