The Lufthansa Group has announced a series of measures to turn around its loss-making subsidiary Eurowings. The Group is to focus Eurowings entirely on short-haul point-topoint operations.
At its recent Capital Markets Day in Frankfurt, the group announced Eurowings will now operate under a single air operators’ certificate (AOC) in Germany and standardise its fleet on the Airbus A320 family.
The carrier will drop the long-haul markets it has served with Airbus A330s, with the eight aircraft used for these markets to be transferred to other operators in the Lufthansa Group.
In a presentation at the Capital Markets Day, Eurowings Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Dirks noted Eurowings’ increased size in recent years, but said the expansion has increased costs, so it has been decided to focus operations around the A320 on four core markets in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart and Hamburg where, he noted, there are higher returns thanks to the amount of premium traffic passing through them.
Dirks said reducing to a single AOC in Germany (Eurowings’ expansion in recent years resulted in four separate AOCs operating under the Eurowings banner) and standardising on A320s (with turboprops leaving the fleet, as well as the long-haul A330s) will enable the carrier to reduce costs and increase productivity of aircraft and crews.
Eurowings’ remaining aircraft will receive more seats (upgauging, to use the unlovely industry word), Dirks revealing the average seat count will increase from 149 to 167 by 2022. The aircraft will also be worked harder, block hours increasing to 3,300 flying hours per aircraft per year by the same date. A new maintenance concept, to be introduced in Q4 this year, is also intended to reduce costs.
It had been planned to integrate fellow Lufthansa Group unit Brussels Airlines into Eurowings but this process will be discontinued, and Brussels Airlines will stand alone and instead be more closely aligned with the group’s network airlines, Lufthansa, Swiss and Austrian. A turnaround plan for Brussels Airlines will be announced in Q3, the group said.
Separately, the Lufthansa Group said it would seek to introduce “innovations in sales and distribution” to grow revenues in the network airlines (Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian) by 3% by 2022. This will involve a “continuous 1–2% annual reduction of unit costs,” the group said. Mark Broadbent
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