After 60 Years, Lufthansa Still Pacing the Pack

BONN —  Germany’s Lufthansa airline marked its 60th year in January. Closed down for 10 years after 1945 by the victorious Allies, Lufthansa has since achieved a record for efficiency and profitability that is the envy of many other state-owned carriers.

Its meteoric rise parallels Bonn’s own postwar “economic miracle” and has been fueled most recently by a boom in West German exports. Lufthansa is now the world’s second-biggest freight carrier after Japan Air Lines.

The airline, whose crane emblem has adorned the tail of its aircraft before and after the World War II, had only 11 aircraft when it resumed flights in 1955, a few weeks before the new West German state was granted full sovereignty by the Allies. Today, its fleet includes 130 planes carrying 16 million passengers a year to 131 destinations around the world.

But for all its success internationally, Lufthansa is still barred from flying to Berlin, where the company was founded Jan. 6, 1926. This lucrative route is the preserve of the four powers in the divided city--the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Britain.

Aviation Pioneer

Lufthansa, presently the world’s fourth-largest airline as measured by the number of passengers carried on its international routes, has been an aviation pioneer since its early days.

It was one of the first airlines to employ stewards and stewardesses in the 1930s and initiated the first regularly scheduled transoceanic flights with the launch of a postal service to South America in 1934.

Lufthansa was the first European airline to fly American-built Boeing 747s in 1970 and is still closely watched by the aviation industry for new trends in the purchase of airliners.

The airline flourished before World War II with flights to North America and East Asia but had to cut services drastically when the Nazi government requisitioned its planes for the war effort in 1940.

After the war, the Allies decreed at the Potsdam conference that Germans be barred from “manufacturing, owning, upkeeping and running aircraft of all types.”

When Lufthansa resumed operations 10 years later, it employed American and British pilots for the first year while German pilots, unable to fly for a decade, learned about the latest flying techniques and instruments.

The Cologne-based company lost money for the first nine years of its postwar history but has been in the black ever since, except for 1971, when the West German mark was revalued, and 1973, when German air traffic controllers staged a slowdown. In 1984, its profit trebled to $65 million and company officials predict that results for 1985 should again be good.