It’s an exciting day for Lufthansa, as the Star Alliance carrier is taking delivery of its first Boeing 787-9 with its new Allegris cabins. It remains to be seen when most of the business class seats can actually be used, though.
Lufthansa’s Allegris Dreamliners bound for Frankfurt!
Lufthansa is working on renewing its long haul fleet, and a large part of that involves taking delivery of 34 brand new Boeing 787-9s.
The airline already has five Dreamliners in its fleet, but they have non-standard interiors. That’s because they were actually intended for Hainan Airlines, but Lufthansa acquired them opportunistically, and eventually they’re expected to fly for Lufthansa Group carrier Austrian.
The 34 upcoming Dreamliner deliveries are all expected to feature Lufthansa’s new Allegris interiors, including the new business class, premium economy, and economy (they won’t feature first class). They’ll all be based in Frankfurt (FRA), and should operate long haul flights.
Lufthansa actually has over a dozen of these 787s ready to go, but aspects of their interiors haven’t been certified, which is why they’ve been grounded. Nonetheless, there’s now a major update — Lufthansa is taking delivery of its first new 787 today. Specifically, the aircraft with the registration code D-ABPF is the first to be delivered, and the plane is already over a year old.
The aircraft is expected to fly from Everett (PAE) to Frankfurt (FRA) this evening, with the flight number LH9789. It will depart this afternoon, and will then arrive at its new home tomorrow morning, after a 5,081-mile journey. The expectation is that Lufthansa will take delivery of several of these jets in the coming weeks, given how many of them are in storage.
Entry into service for these planes will be complicated
While it’s exciting that Lufthansa will take delivery of its first purpose built Boeing 787-9, the entry into service for these planes will be complicated. As I’ve covered in a separate post, the issue is that Lufthansa has been struggling with getting the business class seats on these planes certified.
Some of these Dreamliners have been grounded for over a year due to this, but Lufthansa is now moving forward with taking delivery of these planes anyway. As you’d expect, it’s a bit of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
In the coming weeks, we should see Lufthansa start to fly these new Dreamliners within Europe, prior to having them start transatlantic flying in October. The catch is that only four of the 28 business class seats can actually be sold to passengers, since only the business class suites in the first row are certified. The rest of the seats will have to remain empty for the foreseeable future, until certification comes through.
It’s anyone’s guess how long that takes — Lufthansa is hoping the seats will be certified by the end of the year, but who knows…
Bottom line
Lufthansa is today taking delivery of its very first Boeing 787-9 with new Allegris interiors (yay!). Unfortunately most of the business class seats aren’t yet certified, so Lufthansa will have a bit of a headache with these seats for quite some time (boo!).
It goes without saying that Lufthansa has had quite the struggle getting its planes with Allegris cabins into service, though this is at least another step forward. I hope these cabins get certified soon, since it would be nice to basically have the number of Allegris long haul planes in service double overnight.
What do you make of Lufthansa’s first Allegris Boeing 787 delivery?
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