The crane on the tail of every Lufthansa aircraft is older than Lufthansa. Otto Firle drew it in 1918 for a company called Deutsche Luft-Reederei, eight years before any airline with Hansa in its name existed at all. That bird has since outlived a world war, a bankruptcy, a divided country, and a good dozen paint jobs.
Which makes it a fitting way into German aviation, because the name printed on your boarding pass often has very little to do with who actually flies you.
Lufthansa Is Bigger than the Name on Your Ticket
Lufthansa Group moves well over 130 million passengers a year with a fleet in the seven hundreds, which makes it the largest airline group in Europe by revenue. (Ryanair carries more people. Different business, different math.)
But group and nationality are two separate questions. SWISS is Swiss, Austrian is Austrian, Brussels Airlines is Belgian, and ITA Airways is Italian. All four belong to the group. None of them are ours.
The German part of the family is Lufthansa itself, plus Eurowings, Discover Airlines, Lufthansa CityLine, and the newest arrival, Lufthansa City Airlines. Frankfurt and Munich are the two hubs. The registered headquarters, though, sits in Cologne, which still surprises people who assume everything Lufthansa happens in Frankfurt.
Here is the part that affects you. A Lufthansa flight from Munich to Manchester may be operated by Lufthansa City Airlines, Frankfurt to Orlando by Discover, and a short European hop by Air Dolomiti, which is Italian and also Lufthansa-owned. Your bag, your miles, and your booking reference all behave normally. The cabin, the crew, and the legroom do not always match what you had in mind.
So read the “operated by” line before you get attached to an idea. It sits on every booking, usually in the smallest type on the page.
The Crane Is Older than the Airline
Firle’s crane passed to Deutsche Aero Lloyd in 1923, and when Aero Lloyd merged with Junkers Luftverkehr in January 1926, the new company took both the bird and the name: Deutsche Luft Hansa. Hansa, as in the medieval merchants’ league. My page on the Hanseatic League tells you how a Baltic trading network from the Middle Ages ended up naming an airline.
That first Lufthansa is also the chapter that used to get skipped, and it should not be. The airline was woven into the Nazi state. Board members joined the party from 1930 onward, the company maintained Luftwaffe aircraft, and by 1944 armaments work brought in more than two-thirds of its revenue. More than 12,000 forced laborers were put to work, at times close to half the entire workforce, and researchers have since established that children were among them. For decades the modern company pointed at the legal break between the two firms and left it there. It stopped doing that in its centenary year, which was late by roughly seventy of them.
The old airline stopped flying in April 1945 and was wound up in 1951. Two years later a company with the deliberately boring name LUFTAG was registered in Cologne, and in 1954 it bought the name, the flag, and the crane out of the bankruptcy estate for 30,000 marks. Scheduled service started again in 1955, and the famous yellow arrived a decade after that, from Otl Aicher and his students at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm.
And the state? Gone since 1997, apart from a brief pandemic stake that was sold off again. People still call Lufthansa the German flag carrier out of habit, not ownership.
The Other Lufthansa
In 1955 East Germany founded an airline too, and called it Deutsche Lufthansa. Same name, same crane, same claim to 1926.
One problem: the West had bought those rights the year before. So while the lawyers argued, the East quietly registered a spare company in 1958 under the name Interflug, and crews on international routes carried Interflug uniforms in their luggage along with decals to paste over the logo on the fuselage. Change clothes, change the paint, fly home. ;-)
The case was lost in a Belgrade court, and in 1963 the East German Lufthansa was liquidated. Interflug inherited the aircraft, the routes, and the staff, and flew on for another twenty-eight years—mostly with Soviet equipment—until the Treuhandanstalt shut it down after reunification.
Ask anyone who grew up in Leipzig or Rostock about that airline and watch what happens to their face.
Condor and Its Stripes
Condor was founded in December 1955 as Deutsche Flugdienst GmbH, and the list of founders tells you everything about the decade: two shipping lines, Norddeutscher Lloyd and the Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, together with the state railway and Lufthansa. The first commercial flight in March 1956 was not a beach run either. It was a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, on a Vickers Viking with 36 seats.
The name arrived in 1961. The stripes are much more recent, and plenty of us here still do a double take at a fuselage painted like a beach parasol. Ownership has been the rougher ride: Lufthansa, then Thomas Cook, then the Thomas Cook collapse of 2019, which Condor survived and its parent did not. Today the investment firm Attestor holds 51 percent, the rest on behalf of the federal government and the state of Hesse.
Roughly fifty aircraft, one long-haul hub at Frankfurt, and since 2024 a long-haul fleet made up entirely of Airbus A330neos. No alliance membership, which matters if you are chasing status somewhere.
For American readers this is the airline worth knowing about. New York JFK, Boston, and Seattle run to Frankfurt year-round, and roughly a dozen more North American cities get seasonal nonstops over the summer, including several that no other carrier links to Germany without a change of planes. If you live in one of them, Condor is often the difference between sleeping across the Atlantic and standing in a connecting terminal at five in the morning.
Eurowings, Discover, and the Holiday Fleet
Eurowings is the low-cost arm, headquartered in Düsseldorf, running around 110 aircraft and more than 20 million passengers a year, which makes it the biggest budget carrier in the German market. Bases at Cologne Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Stuttgart, and a few spots abroad. Cheap, functional, no theater.
Discover Airlines is the newer idea, flying since 2021 out of Frankfurt and Munich and built for people going on vacation rather than to a meeting. Its A330s reach the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, southern Africa, and North America, and several of the American routes were handed over by Lufthansa itself. Lufthansa City Airlines is the baby of the group, flying since summer 2024 from Munich and, since early 2026, from Frankfurt as well.
Then the holiday specialists. TUI fly Deutschland works out of Hanover with Boeing 737s and no long-haul left at all. Marabu carries a Condor booking code and flies from German airports on an Estonian license, an arrangement our pilots’ union has criticized loudly and not without cause. Sundair is the small one, based in Stralsund, and its chief executive bought the Air Berlin trademark in 2023, which is either sentiment or a very long game.
The Ones That Are Gone
Air Berlin was for years the second-largest airline in the country. It was also founded in Portland, Oregon.
Not a typo. Under the four-power arrangement, only airlines registered in the United States, Britain, or France could use the air corridors into West Berlin, so in July 1978 a Pan Am man who had lost his Berlin flying job set up Air Berlin Inc. as a subsidiary of his family’s lumber and ranching business in Oregon. The first flight left Berlin-Tegel for Palma de Mallorca on April 28, 1979, on a Boeing 707 that had previously belonged to TWA.
Four decades later it ran out of road. Etihad pulled its funding in August 2017, and the final Air Berlin flight, Munich to Tegel on October 27, flew a farewell lap over the city before it landed.
LTU was swallowed by Air Berlin, and the brand was retired in 2011. Germanwings stopped flying in April 2020; the pandemic ended it officially, though the name had been carrying a heavy load since 2015. Germania, a holiday carrier around since the eighties, went under in early 2019. Four names off the departure boards inside a decade, which is what travelers rarely notice about this market: it looks settled from the outside and has been nothing of the sort.
The Eight-Seaters of the North Sea
Now for my favorite corner of German aviation.
Two small operators fly the North Sea islands, and both belong to ferry companies, which is a wonderfully German arrangement: the ferry operators run their own competition. FLN Frisia works from Norddeich under the name Inselflieger (island flyer). OFD flies from Emden. Their workhorse is the Britten-Norman Islander, a boxy British twin that seats eight and has been doing this job since the early seventies.
They serve Norderney, Wangerooge, Borkum, and Helgoland in hops of a few minutes each, where the ferry needs a good deal longer. Which islands get scheduled flights shifts from year to year, and Juist lost its connection in 2025 when the new express ferries took the passengers. Fog is the enemy out here, not wind, and it has been the enemy since the sixties. When the coast is socked in, nobody flies and you take the boat like everybody else.
Helgoland is the one to do if you only do one. The airfield is not on the main island at all but on Düne, the sandy islet next door, roughly 70 km / 43 mi off the mainland. You land, walk to the pier, and take a small ferry across to the rock itself. Cars and bicycles are banned on both islands, so that boat is not decoration. It is the road. ;-)
What This Means for Your Trip
Flying inside Germany is rarely the clever move anymore. We charge an aviation tax on every departing passenger, airport fees are steep, and both Ryanair and easyJet have pulled capacity out of the country over it. Domestic fares have not come down as a result, while the train delivers you from city center to city center with no security line and no bus out to a remote gate.
Coming from North America, check Condor before you accept a connection through Amsterdam or Reykjavík, especially if your home airport is not a traditional transatlantic gateway. For what waits at the German end, I keep a separate page for every airport here, and a broader one on getting to and around Germany.
And if you make it as far as the coast, take the little plane out to one of the islands at least once. Eight seats, no jet bridge, no safety video, and the whole Wattenmeer spread out underneath you the entire way. It is the only flying left in this country that still feels like the nineteen-twenties.