Interflug

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Interflug

IATA IF	ICAO IFL	Callsign Interflug
Founded		1963
Hubs		Schönefeld International Airport
Fleet size
Destinations
Headquarters		East Berlin, East Germany
Key people

Interflug was the former state airline of East Germany from 1963 until 1991, when it ceased operations following German reunification. Originally, the East German national airline was called Deutsche Lufthansa (officially Deutsche Lufthansa GmbH der DDR), but this met opposition from West Germany, with a court case in Bern awarding the Lufthansa trademark to the West German company.

Interflug (shortened form of Internationaler Flug, "international flight") was founded in 1958 as a second East German airline to operate charter flights, so in 1963 when the Lufthansa name was lost, Interflug provided its identity for East Germany's "new" flag carrier.

Based at Schönefeld airport near East Berlin, for a long time Interflug used only Soviet and Czechoslovak aircraft such as the Ilyushin Il-62 (11 were bought) and Tupolev Tu-134 (18 were bought), Tu-124 and Tu-154. Soviet and Czech aircraft were used by Interflug due to the demise of the East German-designed Baade B-152, which was then the first German-designed jet-airliner (in either East or West German state); however, the Baade B-152 was only ever made in prototype after which the project was cancelled in 1961. In June 1989 it introduced the first Western-built aircraft in the form of three Airbus A310s as Interflug's director at the time, Dr. Klaus Henkes, successfully appealed to the then leader of the GDR, SED General Secretary Erich Honecker, to purchase Western aircraft in order to position Interflug as a modern airline [1]. This proved to be difficult for a Communist state due to a lack of hard currencies on their part, and the deal went through after Franz Josef Strauß, the then minister-president of the state of Bavaria in the then West Germany and a founding member of the Airbus Industrie, helped negotiate the purchase with West German state loans. After reunification and before its final liquidation, Interflug wet-leased one De Havilland Canada Dash 8 aircraft from Tyrolean Airways to cover the remainder of contractual obligations of flying to Vienna after liquidation was announced. There were also long-term fleet renewal plans in the works, such as purchasing Boeing 767 for long-haul routes and Boeing 737 for European routes which feasibility studies were taken even when the GDR was still a Soviet satellite state [2], but the airline was liquidated before anything concrete materialized.

Interflug operated mainly in Europe, particularly Eastern European countries in the Soviet bloc, although it also operated flights to Cuba, Beijing in the People's Republic of China, some countries in Africa aligned with the Soviet Union, Hanoi in Vietnam, Pyongyang in North Korea and in the late 1980s, to non-Communist parts of Southeast Asia including Bangkok and Singapore, both via Dubai. Domestically, Interflug carried 250,000 passengers in 1969. However, increasing traffic on the GDR's national railway, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, led to a noticeable decrease in passenger numbers. By 1971, the airline was flying between five East German cities, having discontinued all flights to Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz). The airline was also responsible for the running of the nation's airports. Following reunification, the airports in the former GDR were sold off separately. The airline first offered regular scheduled service to West Germany in August 1989, from Leipzig to Düsseldorf via overflying Czechoslovak airspace.

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For years, similar to other Communist countries' flag carriers, Interflug had been a financial liability for the GDR government constantly running deep into debt. This was due in part to inefficient Soviet-built aircraft, applying Communist concepts in the running of the airline with the rigid constraints of a state-planned economy, and the interference in daily operations from Communist bureaucrats. The A310 aircraft arrived too late to significantly improve the state-owned, state-run corporation by the time of the airline's liquidation.

The fatal blow to the airline came in the form of disappearance of its sponsor, the GDR government, via German reunification. In March 1990 when reunification was still not at all certain, the then still-West German flag carrier Lufthansa agreed to take a 26 percent stake in Interflug with the aim of an eventual merger [3]. Reunification proceeded rapidly and the newly reunified Germany's Federal Cartel Office rejected this proposal on the grounds of creating a monopoly in the aviation sector after the European Commission raised concerns of open market access [4]. The German government agency originally hoped Interflug would stand on its own and become a second flag carrier to bring in competitions to Lufthansa in the context of liberalization of intra European Community aviation industry that occurred at the same time as German reunification. British Airways, which enjoyed the privilege of one of the Allied countries' airlines operating from West Berlin to the cities in West Germany when Germany was divided, submitted a bid to acquire Interflug to continue having a foothold in Germany after reunification [5][6]. The Lufthansa deal fell through but the hopes of the government did not materialize as British Airways sought shares in Delta Air instead. Similarly, other airlines showed lukewarm interests in gaining a foothold in Germany's aviation sector by propping up the money-losing Interflug.

In March 1991, Interflug was liquidated by the government and Lufthansa was selected as the agent for liquidation [7]. Its 32 aircraft being sold for US$192.3 million. Twelve of the Tu-134 jets were later acquired by Vietnam Airlines for domestic and regional flights until 1997. [8] The company's trio of Airbus A310 aircraft were acquired by the Federal Government of Germany for use as VIP transports. A number of the former Interflug employees gained employment at Lufthansa and its subsidiary companies, including Condor and Lufthansa Technik, while employees in the airport operations divisions became employees of the new respective municipal-owned airport corporations, but many others went into unemployment.