News / Jet fuel costs force LH freighter withdrawal

They are among the 27 operational aircraft run by the German carrier’s CityLine subsidiary that were removed from the flight programme starting last week, in order to reduce further losses of the loss-making airline.

Lufthansa CFO Till Streichert said that the group had already identified the prospective removal of CityLine from its programme independently of the current geopolitical crisis, the latter having accelerated the move.

“Lufthansa Cargo had been marketed the capacity of the four A321 freighters on short- and medium-haul routes, operated by Lufthansa CityLine. The airline announced on 16 April that it is temporarily suspending its flight operations until further notice. This also affects the four A321 freighters,” a company spokesperson told The Loadstar.

“Our strategic European network is a key component in maintaining global supply chains. Lufthansa Cargo and the Lufthansa Group are aware of this responsibility. We will now be working with the Lufthansa Group to find a way to offer this cargo capacity to our customers again as soon as possible.”

As recently as the beginning of February this year, Lufthansa Cargo announced two additional destinations to its A321 freighter schedule from Frankfurt to Rome-Fiumicino (FCO) en route to Istanbul with the leg via Munich. The second new destination was the Algerian capital, Algiers – taking the number of cities served in the Middle East and Africa to six, Beirut, Casablanca, Cairo Tel Aviv, and Tunis. Yerevan, in Armenia, was also part of the A321F network.

However, schedules have since being impacted as a result of the military conflict in the Gulf.

The high cost of jet fuel is beginning to call into question the continued operation of certain older aircraft, notably the B747-400F.

Lufthansa is to ground two passenger versions of the type from October onwards for the coming winter season and is panning a “final farewell” to them next year.

Speaking at a recent webinar, Henk Venema, DHL Global Forwarding’s (DGF) EVP, Global Airfreight, underlined that the B747-400 freighter would quickly become “economically unviable to operate if the price of kerosene remained at elevated levels.

He said a good many freighters carrying e-commerce goods from China to Europe could well be taken out of the market because it would not make sense to fly them from a cost point of view,  “especially the older Boeing 747-400F models.”

Venema went on to speculate that these freighters could end up having a role to play in what he describes as “probably the biggest growth engine of air freight overall in 2026 and beyond – the shipment of hyperscale AI”.