The first of Lufthansa’s refitted and upgraded Airbus A380 superjumbos has departed on its first commercial passenger flight from Munich to Los Angeles after spending two and a half months at the Elbe Flugzeugwerke maintenance company in Dresden, where it underwent a massive retrofit.
The star of the new-look cabin are 68 Business Class seats, which provide direct aisle access from every seat for the first time on Lufthansa’s A380s.
The 15-year-old aircraft (registration: D-AIMC) was sent to Dresden on February 1 and remained on the ground, undergoing a tip-to-tail refit until April 21, when it was ‘ferried’ back to Munich on April 21.
After a couple of days in Munich, undergoing final preparations, the plane was returned to passenger operations on Thursday, departing at around 12:30 pm as flight LH-452 to Los Angeles.
Lufthansa has been hyping the planned retrofits of its A380 superjumbo fleet for the last two years, but the beleaguered German flag carrier isn’t installing its bespoke Allegris Business and First Class seats as part of the refit process.
Fearing that the certification process for the Allegris seats by safety regulators would keep the A380s for months on end, Lufthansa decided to ditch its Allegris concept and opted for an off-the-shelf Business Class seat.
Lufthansa chose the Vantage XL seat, manufactured by Northern Irish-based manufacturer Thompson Aero Seating. The Vantage XL isn’t state-of-the-art and doesn’t come with privacy doors, but it’s long been certified for use on Airbus A380s.
As a result, Lufthansa could be confident that it could refit its superjumbos with new seats without running the risk of nasty surprises like certification delays.
This is exactly what happened with Lufthansa’s brand new Boeing 787 Dreamliners, which feature the bespoke Allegris seats. While European regulators certified the seats for use on the Airbus A350, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was a lot more cautious in certifying the seats for the Boeing 787 fleet.
Initially, Lufthansa refused delivery of newly built 787s grounded from Boeing as it awaited certification of its Allegris seats, but when this process dragged on, the airline eventually started to take delivery of these planes.
Lufthansa started to fly the planes with nearly all of the Allegris Business Class seats blocked out, and it wasn’t until last month that the FAA certified most of the seats. Even now, several seats remain unusable while further certification work is carried out.
The Vantage XL seats are used by a number of international carriers, including Australian airline Qantas, on its Airbus A380s. The seat is also already familiar with some Lufthansa passengers who have flown on second-hand Boeing 787 Dreamliners that the airline acquired from the Philippines Airlines, which also feature this seat.
Given that the Vantage XL seats provide direct aisle access at every seat, they take up slightly more room than the previous generation seats, and, therefore, the overall Business Class seat count is reduced from 78 to 68 seats.
Lufthansa plans to cut the number of flight attendants working on its A380s because the Business Class cabin is smaller, although the decision has proven controversial with the airline’s flight attendant union.
Non-modified A380s are currently staffed with 21 crew members, while the refitted A380s will only have 20 flight attendants on board. In comparison, Qatar Airways has as many as 27 flight attendants on its A380s, Emirates has a crew of 25 flight attendants, and even British Airways has a staffing level of 22 flight attendants.
