GermanWings: The prelude to Eurowings (AvHistory #17)
A Lesson in Aeronautical Control & The Risks of Rapid Expansion & Competition
Today, we will take a look at the most cautionary low-cost airline (LCC) lesson in Europe.
GermanWings (as it was stylized in marketing) GmbH was, for the entire duration of its existence, owned by Lufthansa (Deutsche Lufthansa Group) and was headquartered in Cologne (Köln), Germany with airline hubs (frankly, you all should know what a hub is by now, let's be honest) at Köln-Bonn Airport (serving the West German capital of Bonn).
Further, GermanWings was also based at Hamburg Airport, Stuttgart Airport, Munich (München) and Berlin-Tegel Airport. Berlin-Tegel Airport is another interesting case, as it was eventually replaced with the modern and current Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport (IATA code: BER). I may do an entire adjacent series on new airport developments; San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, all New York airports, Newark, Berlin, Brazil, Spain, Dubai, Malaysia, Thailand, all regions and countries have airports under either re-development or renovation, or a ground-up rebuild, and these are all critically important to a region's economy and in most cases, lifeblood of its citizenry.
Origins and Early History
Germanwings or GermanWings, both accurate terms from a marketing perspective, operated independently as Lufthansa's low-cost carrier until October 2015, when Lufthansa decided to fully transfer the brand identity of its low cost short haul-product (SH-LCC) to Eurowings. In 1997, Eurowings set up a low-cost department for long- and short-haul travel operated almost exclusively by Germanwings, which was eventually spun off and became a separate company under the name GermanWings in October of 2002. On 7th of December in 2005 in an attempt to modernize and expand their operations, GermanWings signed an agreement to purchase 18 Airbus A319-100 aircraft, with deliveries scheduled from July 2006 until 2008.
Transition to Wet-Lease Operator
After 2016, GermanWings operated as a wet-lease operator for its sister company Eurowings, with the GermanWings branding being phased out. To add context, and provide definition for our readers, wet-leasing is the process of a leasing arrangement by which one airline (being the lessor) provides an aircraft, complete crew, maintenance, and insurance (abbreviated as ACMI) to another airline or other type of business acting as a broker of air travel (acting as the lessee), which pays by hours operated. The lessee provides fuel and covers airport fees, and any other duties, taxes, extraterritoriality fees, etc. The flight uses the flight number of the lessee. A wet-lease generally lasts 1-24 months. A wet-lease is typically utilized during peak traffic seasons or annual heavy maintenance checks, or to initiate new routes. A wet-leased aircraft may be used to fly services into countries where the lessee is banned from operating.
Mergers, Subsidiaries, and Brand Changes
In 2008, initial plans were made to merge GermanWings, Eurowings and the exclusively travel agent-centered (yet German-owned) airline TUIfly, into one airline to compete with the short-haul turboprop Air Berlin in the German market and with easyJet and Ryanair on international routes. However, these plans were never realized. Instead, GermanWings became a wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa on New Years' Day of 2009.
In 2012, Lufthansa announced its plans to transfer point-to-point shorthaul flights operating from cities other than Frankfurt and Munich from Lufthansa to GermanWings. Therefore, the company received a revised corporate design. These transfers were made between spring 2013 and autumn 2014; Düsseldorf Airport was the last base transferred. Further, about 33 individual aircraft were transferred from Lufthansa - mainline, to GermanWings, now solely operated by Eurowings as of 2026.
In January 2015, Lufthansa Group announced that it would discontinue the GermanWings LCC brand and replace it with Eurowings starting in late 2015. The first Germanwings bases to be mostly taken over by Eurowings were Düsseldorf Airport, Hamburg Airport - at both of which Eurowings already operated on behalf of Germanwings - and Köln-Bonn Airport.
In December 2016, it was announced that Germanwings would retire 20 aircraft during 2017 without replacement due to Lufthansa's new wet-lease deal with Air Berlin which also provided services for Eurowings.
It was reported by various media outlets that the Air Berlin aircraft were newer and cheaper to operate than those of Germanwings. This was not enough to save Air Berlin and they disintegrated in the summer of 2017 due to lack of demand.
I focus on Air Berlin for two reasons. 1. They were GermanWings primary competitor in the low-cost sector in Europe, and 2. They were the second-largest airline in Germany and tenth-largest in Europe by passenger volume.
In August 2017, the same time Air Berlin folded, it was announced that GermanWings would abandon its own IATA code 4U by late March of 2018. Since then, it has used Eurowings' EW code on for all flight operations, which are already carried out under the Eurowings brand.
In October 2019, the last hub and base for GermanWings, the Pristina base (in still-recovering war-torn Kosovo), which had been operated by Germanwings since June 2019, only a few months at that point, was transferred to Eurowings Europe. In return, Germanwings took over the German base in Munich which had been operated by its sister airline. On the 7th of April in 2020, in the height of the pandemic, Lufthansa announced that it would be shutting down Germanwings permanently, partly due to the large travel ban during COVID-19 though the turning point had occurred in 2015.
Flight 9525
GermanWings only had one crash of note, which is not considered a death knell for GermanWings given the profitability of its parent Lufthansa, but is generally considered an embarrassment and the turning point for Germanwings, forcing Lufthansa Group to make a decision that ultimately resulted in folding Germanwings into Eurowings.
On 24 March 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525, an Airbus A320-211 with registration D-AIPX flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, crashed in the south of France near Digne-les-Bains; 150 people were killed, with no survivors. German investigators concluded that 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had deliberately crashed the plane, while alone in the cockpit and locking the cockpit door.
Cabin Offerings and Fare Types
In terms of cabin offerings, GermanWings did not offer simply cabin classes. They offered a unique collection of hard and soft products though nothing exceeded Economy Class; Germanwings had offered three fare types since 2013.
- Basic was no-frills and offered no inclusive catering and only hand luggage.
- Best included hold baggage, inclusive snacks and drinks as well as access to some lounges for tier members of Miles&More, Lufthansa's membership program.
- Smart and Best more or less corresponded to the short- or long-haul Lufthansa service offered on the routes taken over by Germanwings.
The fleet was only equipped with Economy Class seating.
Onboard Products and Booking Innovations
Germanwings offered Sky Bistro (or Bord Shop in German), a buy-on-board food and drinks program which is fairly commonplace for low-cost carriers (and select services on legacy carriers) but was a unique innovation at the time of its introduction. The airline provided an inflight magazine, a bi-monthly German and English magazine called GW. While the primary editorial focus of GW was rooted in Germanwings destinations, similar to United Airlines' Hemispheres magazine (the world's last in-flight hardcopy magazine which, as of 2025, transitioned and went solely digital), the content was not exclusively about travel.
Germanwings booking service provided Blind Booking, a very unique option that no airline has copied since, that allowed passengers to choose one of Germanwings' base airports, select a category of destination (e.g. Party, Gay-friendly or Culture) and then purchase a round-trip ticket via a random lottery process from among the cities in the category. Such tickets were often priced lower than the corresponding ticket to the same destination, and Germanwings e-mails its customers with details of their destination shortly after the purchase.
This is everything to know about the German low-cost carrier, GermanWings, and their existence and influence on aviation even after its downfall and absorption by Eurowings. Learn even more and book your travel consultation at brookeintheairtravel.net!
