Lufthansa in "panic mode"?

Today there is news (only in German as of now) that Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines are "downgrading" miles flown with Turkish Airlines in their frequent flyer program "Miles & More". Customers who fly with Turkish Airlines on will only get a quarter of the flown miles as status miles. Austrian has canceled the code sharing with THY altogether effective summer 2014. Also Lufthansa is thinking about reducing their code sharing with THY.
This looks a little bit like Lufthansa being in panic mode. In the last two years, there have been multiple opportunities for Lufthansa to set up a wide ranging partnership with THY to fend off the three large gulf carriers. But the Lufthansa management seemed to be confident to go their way without it. Now that Turkish Airlines expanded in Germany big way, flying to 14 destinations today and just announced another one (Kassel-Calden) and many customers including business class customers flying to the Far East prefer THY due to prices and service, Lufthansa reacts.
The only way this move makes sense is that LH has another big plan on the table. Last week there I saw there were news that Lufthansa and Emirates are talking to each other ... could there be another alliance a la Emirates/Qantas in the making?

Turkish Airlines orders more Narrowbodies

As I envisioned here, Turkish Airlines will not just rely on Airbus for their future narrowbody fleet. Today THY announced that they placed orders for 20 B737-800, 40 B737MAX-8 and 10 B737MAX-9. THY also placed 25 options. On March 15 Turkish Airlines announced to buy 20 A321, 4 A320neo and 53 A321neo and placed 35 options for further A321neo.

Good days for the A320!

What a week for Airbus! John Leahy predicted at the beginning of last week during his presentation at the ISTAT conference that until the end of March Airbus will have more than 2000 orders for the A320neo. While the number itself is technically just as good as 1900 or 2100, it justifies once more the decision to go ahead with the neo program in December 2010. Boeing, as it seems, was really caught by surprise, despite Airbus was talking about the possible launch for months before deciding to launch the neo program.

Lufthansa

The Lufthansa order was not a big surprise. I wrote about that in an earlier post. Nico Buchholz, VP

Narrowbody Outlook 2013

After Boeing and Airbus unveiled their final order and delivery numbers for 2012 it is now time to turn to what is ahead. What will 2013 bring us in the narrowbody segment?

Let’s begin with deliveries – this is quite easy:

·         Airbus stabilizes their output rate at 42/month and will deliver 480-485 A320 family aircraft (ca. 11.5*42 as we have to take the summer break into account)

·         Boeing will increase the delivery rate towards  38 B737NG’s per month and therefore deliver between 450-460 narrowbodies.

·         Bombardier will deliver the first CS100 in 2014, so A & B are (probably for the last time) alone.