An this Friday around 2.30 p.m. it is worth taking a trip to Frankfurt Airport, there is a small aviation sensation to admire. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr had predicted that it would never return, and now it is back: The Airbus A 380 is returning to the Lufthansa fleet. In September 2021, the four-engine machines of history, taken out of service by Corona, were mothballed in Teruel, Spain. Deep storage is the technical term, it already indicated that an engine cannot simply be restarted.
But aviation is recovering faster than expected, Lufthansa even uses used Boeing and Airbus modern designs from Asian stocks to expand capacity, and the same applies to the A 380: nothing is impossible. Emirates, already the largest operator, but also British Airways and Singapore Airlines are rediscovering the large passenger aircraft. There is only cautious talk of inefficiency, although of course nothing has changed in the technical framework data. And the enthusiasm is not that exuberant, the manufacturer Airbus has so far ruled out a new edition with more powerful engines under the brand name Neo.
Three and a half hours flight time
Lufthansa is now retrieving three or four machines, the first of which bears the baptismal name Düsseldorf and the identifier D-AIMK. It will take off from Teruel in Spain at around 11 a.m. with flight number LH 9921 and will land in Frankfurt after a flight time of around three and a half hours. The flight time is unusually long, since it has to be flown with an extended route. In Teruel it is not possible to carry out the gear swing test of the chassis. The aircraft is jacked up to check that the landing gear extends and retracts properly. Therefore, the two pilots have to fly slower and a little lower. It accompanies a lot of emotion, the longtime chief pilot Jürgen Raps sent a video message from Arizona with the sentence that he never doubted that “my baby will be put back into service”.
In Frankfurt, each revived aircraft will take around two months of work time to become ready for scheduled service again. Wheels and brakes are replaced, fluids exchanged and refilled, emergency slides repaired, all in all several thousand hours of maintenance are estimated. Starting next summer, the Düsseldorf and its colleagues will fly regularly again. She is stationed in Munich. Stand now. Because, as you can see from the A 380, which has long been written off, nothing can be predicted with certainty in aviation.
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