Lufthansa (LH, Frankfurt International) is looking at the A220 and E2 families as it evaluates options for the renewal of its European regional fleet, anonymous sources told Bloomberg news agency.
Lufthansa Group Chief Executive Carsten Spohr confirmed during a quarterly earnings call that it had sent out Requests for Proposals to regional jet manufactures but without going into any further details.
The ch-aviation fleets module shows Lufthansa CityLine (CL, Munich) operates thirty-one CRJ900s (12.5 years old on average), nine E190s (11.5 years), and two E195s (12 years). The mainline carrier does not operate any regional aircraft. The A220, even in the smaller A220-100 variant, would thus represent a significant upgauge for the airline's regional network.
Swiss, a fellow Lufthansa Group carrier, operates nine A220-100s and twenty-one A220-300s. The Airbus aircraft fill the gap between wet-leased Embraer regional jets (Helvetic Airways operates four E190s and eight E190-E2s on behalf of Swiss) and its in-house A320-200/A320-200N narrowbodies.
In terms of other fleet developments, Spohr told aeroTELEGRAPH that Lufthansa was now expecting the deliveries of its first B787-9s in the first quarter of 2022. The airline ordered five white-tail units in May 2021 and initially hoped to induct them into the fleet by the end of the year. However, Spohr stressed that the small delay was not a problem for Lufthansa.
"We all know that, Boeing has major problems with deliveries that also affect our aircraft. We would like to have them in the summer, when we need them," he said.
If the aircraft are not delivered by the Summer 2022 season, Lufthansa will replace them with its existing A340-300s of which it currently operates seventeen.
Spohr told journalist Kurt Hofmann that the holding would allocate all of its forthcoming aircraft to specific airlines on the basis of expected return on investment from their hubs - he stressed that the individual carriers would have to "meet the monthly cost" of the new aircraft. He stressed that while the three remaining B767-300ERs operated by Austrian Airlines were the holding's most immediate concern for replacement in terms of widebody aircraft, the carrier would still have to compete for new units against its sister airlines.
The German holding nearly broke even in the third quarter of 2021, posting a meagre EUR72 million euro (USD83.4 million) net loss - compared to EUR2 billion (USD2.3 billion) in the same period of 2020. While the group's network airlines (Lufthansa, Swiss, Brussels Airlines, and Austrian Airlines) remained loss-making on the operating level, Eurowings, Lufthansa Cargo, and Lufthansa Technik all posted EBIT profits.
