Lufthansa (LH, Frankfurt International) has officially launched its "Jump" project with its first reconfigured A340-300 - D-AIGP (cn 252) - operating its first flights between Frankfurt International and Tampa International late last month.
In order to keep operating costs as low as possible, the aircraft are wet-leased to Lufthansa from its Lufthansa CityLine (CL, Munich) subsidiary where crew remuneration is better suited to the project's overall goal which is to provide more competitively priced longhaul flights for the airline's mainline operation.
In order to allow Lufthansa to recapture lost leisure market share, the A340s also feature a high-density leisure configuration with 298 seats in total (eighteen in Business Class, nineteen in Premium Economy, and 261 in Economy).
Flights to Cancún, Malé, and Mauritius are expected to roll out with effect from December of this year.
The project is not to be confused with Lufthansa's dedicated LCC project which will see Eurowings (EW, Düsseldorf) repositioned as a regional and longhaul budget operation. LCC Eurowings will operate a fleet of A330-200s (wet-leased from SunExpress Deutschland (Frankfurt International)) on intercontinental flights while using a fleet of A319-100s and A320-200s for regional European flights.
It has now been learned that Eurowings, which recently took delivery of its first factory-fresh A320-200 (sl) D-AEWX (cn 6807), will employ Eurowings A320-200s for its proposed Vienna base and will not use crews from Austrian Airlines (OS, Vienna) as previously thought. This will continue until such time that Eurowings Europe (Austria) (E2, Vienna) secures its AOC from the Austrian authorities wherein Eurowings will begin using that subsidiary to operate flights out of Vienna on its behalf.
