Augsburg Airways Masters Expansion into Jet Era
Pressemitteilung: Munich/Hallbergmoos, 17. 07. 2009
Augsburg Airways has made a great success of handling the transition from turbo-prop carrier to jet flight provider.
This is the conclusion drawn by Augsburg Airways Managing Director, Bernadette Rampl, on Friday. "All of us were ready and well prepared to enter our jet age, and then the aircraft itself just made things so easy for us," said Rampl at the company's head office in Hallbergmoos, at the end of the first week's flight operation of the new Embraer 195 regional jet.
Customer feedback has been positive throughout, with passengers enthusing about the light, spacious cabin – clearly also a plus of the Brazilian-made Embraer jet in professional circles, too.
The Embraer 195 is currently the largest regional jet available on the market. In spite of its size, the cabin has a 2+2 seating arrangement, without a middle seat. With Augsburg Airways, there are 116 seats categorised into two classes.
The new aircraft, which carries the registration D-AEMA, was put into service on 13th July, with a return flight from Munich to Vienna. This is the first aircraft of its type to be registered in Germany, and Augsburg Airways will be taking delivery of four more this summer.
As a regional partner to German Lufthansa, the airline will be flying its new planes on behalf of Lufthansa and using Lufthansa flight numbers, on busy routes such as to Nice, Oslo and Vienna, but also on German domestic flights, for instance to Düsseldorf, Bremen or Münster/Osnabrück.
Until now, the Augsburg Airways fleet consisted of 13 type DASH 8 turbo-prop aircraft of the Canadian manufacturer, Bombardier. In the future, too, ten Dash 8 Q400 machines will continue to form the backbone of the Augsburg Airways fleet.
At the head office of Augsburg Airways in Hallbergmoos, in the direct vicinity of Munich airport, airline boss Rampl went into some of the additional advantages of the new Embraer jets on Friday: they are comfortable, economical - and ecological. The Embraer 195 uses less than 4 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres per passenger, and noise levels are well below all ICAO noise certification standards.
With its two General Electric CF34 - 10 engines, the Embraer 195 can reach speeds of 870 km/h at a cruising height of 12,000 metres. Fully-occupied, the 51-tonne plane has a cruising range of up to 3,300 km. The cockpit is dominated by state-of-the-art aviation electronics for category III all-weather flight operation.
Starting jet flight operations has resulted in the creation of some 150 new jobs at Augsburg Airways – in the most far-reaching economic crisis to hit the global aerospace industry since the end of World War II. The workforce of the airline increased from 330 to about 470.
On the occasion of the maiden flight, Steffen Harbarth, Head of the Lufthansa Hub in Munich, commented on the outstanding efficiency of the Embraer 195, and also on the fact that, with the new jet, Augsburg Airways would be able to reach destinations all over Europe for the first time ever – from Poland to Spain, Northern Europe to the Mediterranean. Munich's airport boss, Dr. Michael Kerkloh, welcomed the fact that the new, low-noise aircraft would meet the airport's quality requirements. With the new aircraft, Augsburg Airways have doubled the number of seats they can offer on flights from Munich.
About Augsburg Airways
Founded in 1980, Augsburg Airways has since developed from an in-company air service into a modern regional airline. Today, the airline operates 14 aircraft, and this number will have risen to 16 by the end of 2009. The airline is a highly efficient partner in the Lufthansa Regional network.In 2008, Augsburg Airways transported 928,193 passengers. From Munich, its base airport, the airline, on behalf of Lufthansa, offers more than 200 flights to 21 different destinations a week.
