Lufthansa will fly its last passenger Airbus A340-600 service on October 18, 2026, ending 23 years of the four-engine jet at the airline. Here's why I'll miss it.
Gonna miss those downstairs lavatories... and the forever long takeoff rolls.
My only F experience so far was on board this plane (MUC-MEX). Farewell A340-600 :'(
Awesome Plane
Oddly, I've been on the 340-600 only four times, ever: three times on VS and once on SA, and that's it. 340-300s zillions of times, all on LH and LX.
I'll miss seeing them around and knowing that they're in one of my hometown airports (IAD), as they are really quite beautiful. Sad they'll be gone from mainstream/mainline flying.
Syd, if you're reading this, you may owe me a crude, mocking musical quote right about now, however I do sense that you're classier than I... 🙂
While I've never flown a European carrier (let alone Lufthansa), my one regret as an avgeek and Cathay-geek is that I only flew their A340-600 once. At the time, it operated one of the top three longest flights in the world, flying between New York and Hong Kong. I took every chance I had with their A340-300.
It's going to be a sad moment when the 744s and 748s start being retied.
Auf weidersehen, A346!
I'm curious Ben, why do you hate FRA? For example, is it worse than MCO, say, or LHR?
"It’ll be a sad day when Lufthansa has no more four engine planes in service."
Ouch. That hurt.
Do any other planes have the downstairs lav?
I don't think conviasa is using theirs. The only international flights on their website right now are very short distance
Last month, I took one last flight on Lufthansa’s A340-600 for the fun of it. I agree it will be truly missed. I thought the downstairs lavatories were fun as well
I think what makes this sad is that essentially all adults who are alive today grew up in an era of continuous innovation in the aviation industry. There were always projects to launch a new planes and excitement to see how different airlines would configure those planes.
In recent times, though, that innovation has seemingly dried up. The 777X, which was supposed to launch a decade ago, is the last big plane launch to look forward towards. The competitors have consolidated, and there are no known projects in the pipeline. Most current planes will simply be periodically refreshed to save 5% on fuel costs while most airlines have started converging on very similar layouts. The biggest, most interesting planes in the sky are all living on borrowed time, to be replaced by smaller, less interesting planes.
No era lasts forever, but for the time being, the commercial aerospace industry is a much less interesting place then it was 20 years ago.