Lufthansa Flies Airbus A340 Across The Atlantic At Just 10,000 Feet And Unpressurized

The German flag carrier Lufthansa flew an Airbus A340-600 across the Atlantic Ocean unpressurized and at an altitude of just 10,000 feet on Tuesday in order to get the plane back to its own maintenance facility for urgent repairs.

The 16-year-old aircraft was badly damaged after landing in Boston on July 5 after a high-loader, which loads and unloads cargo from the belly of the plane, collided with the side of the massive widebody aircraft.

The collision was so bad that the high-loader punctured a hole in the side of the plane, forcing Lufthansa to immediately ground the 281-seater airplane and cancel the scheduled return flight back to Frankfurt, Germany, at the last minute.

Having an aircraft so badly damaged in a foreign country is a worst-case scenario for an international airline, as this kind of repair isn’t something that can be easily contracted out to third-party repairers.

Lufthansa would have wanted its own engineers to carry out the repairs at its own maintenance facilities, but the obvious issue is how you go about getting a plane with fuselage damage safely back to Germany.

In this case, it was possible to patch the hole up just enough that regulators gave the green light for the plane to be flown back to Lufthansa’s home base with no passengers onboard – commonly referred to as a ‘ferry flight.’

After a few days stuck on the ground, Lufthansa arranged for the airplane to be flown across the Atlantic from Boston to Frankfurt at a maximum altitude of just 10,000 feet.

The reason was that the puncture repair meant the plane couldn’t be pressurized, and therefore, the aircraft had to remain at a low altitude to prevent hypoxia among the pilots assigned to operate the flight.

In fact, the plane only flew at 10,000 feet once it got close to Europe and flew most of the way across the Atlantic at between 8,000 to 9,000 feet, taking more than ten and a half hours to reach Frankfurt, more than two hours longer than the normal flight length due to the lower altitude.

Now that the plane is back in Frankfurt, it will go into the maintenance hangar where a more detailed assessment of the damage can take place and repairs can be carried out.

How long that might take remains to be seen, although the aircraft could be grounded for several months.

Although unusual, these types of ferry flights are not unheard of. Last April, Emirates flew a damaged Airbus A380 back to Dubai from Moscow, Russia, after a ground service vehicle somehow got wedged underneath the superjumbo when it was parked at the gate.

In that case, any repairs in Moscow would have been further hampered by Western sanctions on Russia, so Emirates had to temporarily patch up the plane and fly it back to Dubai for further inspection.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lufthansa grounded its fleet of Airbus A340-600s and planned to sell them off or even scrap them, fearing that the quad-engined gas guzzlers were now surplus to requirements.

It didn’t take long, however, for Lufthansa to partially rethink that plan, although it wasn’t necessarily because travel demand was bouncing back.

Instead, it was because the planes feature First Class cabins, and Lufthansa’s well-heeled premium passengers wanted to travel in this cabin.