Air Berlin

» see airberlin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Air Berlin was registered on 11 July 1978 with an American name and American owners because that was the only legal way to run an airline out of West Berlin. Under the postwar air corridor rules, scheduled and charter traffic into the city belonged to carriers from the occupying powers, so a Berlin holiday airline had to be a subsidiary of an American company. It was, of a Florida agricultural firm called Lelco, and the first charter left Tegel for Palma de Mallorca on 28 April 1979.

Reunification took away the legal reason for the American shell and gave the airline a country. Joachim Hunold rebuilt it as a German company in 1991, and over the next fifteen years it grew from a tour operator's aircraft supplier into a full scheduled airline with its own frequent flyer program and city routes that had nothing to do with beaches. The IPO landed on the Frankfurt exchange on 11 May 2006. By the end of 2011 it was flying 35.3 million passengers a year on a fleet of 170 aircraft. Only Lufthansa was bigger in Germany, and only nine airlines were bigger in Europe.

The problem sat underneath all of it. Air Berlin was running a holiday charter operation and a scheduled network with long-haul attached, which meant carrying two cost structures at once and having no clear answer to what kind of ticket it was selling. Lufthansa had the business traveler and Ryanair had the cheap seat. Air Berlin spent the last decade of its life somewhere in between, losing money in every year after 2007 except one.

~ the case file ~

~ the gulf money ~

On 19 December 2011 Etihad Airways raised its holding to 29.1 percent for 73 million euros and became the largest shareholder. This was the middle of Abu Dhabi's equity-alliance period, when Etihad bought minority stakes in struggling European carriers to feed its own hub instead of building a European network from scratch. Air Berlin's job in that plan was to fill seats out of Germany onto Etihad metal.

It worked as a feed and failed as a business. Air Berlin's own turnaround plans kept arriving and kept being replaced, and the losses kept needing cover. Etihad put another 250 million euros in during April 2017. Four months later it said there would be no more, and Air Berlin filed for insolvency on 15 August 2017.

~ the last landing ~

An insolvent airline usually stops selling tickets the same week. This one did not, because the German government put up a 150 million euro bridge loan to keep the fleet flying through the summer holidays and, more to the point, to keep the route network worth something while it was carved up. Ten weeks of negotiation followed, with an election in the middle of it.

The last revenue flight was AB6210 from Munich on Friday 27 October 2017, an A320 registered D-ABHO, on the ground at Tegel at 11:58 in the evening. The crew filed it under the callsign BER4EVR. Around 1,600 staff and spotters watched from the terrace, the fire trucks gave it a water salute, and several hundred employees met the passengers on the apron. Tegel itself closed for good three years later.

~ the turkish detour ~

There is a thin Turkish thread in this story and it is worth pulling, because the name did fly here. From 2012 the flights of IZair, an Izmir carrier with bases at Izmir and Antalya, were sold under the Air Berlin Turkey brand as part of a cooperation with Pegasus. The arrangement lasted about a year before the brand was dropped. IZair kept flying for Pegasus until it was folded into the parent at the end of 2018.

That aside, Air Berlin was an airline for people leaving Germany, and I was not one of them. From this side it was a livery on the arrivals board at the coast in July, a German charter landing full of people who would be gone in two weeks. Germans had an opinion about whether it was cheap enough. We had an opinion about whether the season was good.

~ the pieces ~

Lufthansa paid 210 million euros for 81 aircraft and about 3,000 employees, most of it routed into Eurowings. Separately, easyJet paid 40 million for leases on 25 A320s and took on roughly 1,000 people. Niki, the Austrian leisure arm founded by Niki Lauda, went through a sale that collapsed and was then bought back by Lauda himself, before ending up inside Ryanair. Creditors spent the following years preparing damage claims against Etihad over the promises made before the funding stopped.

What did not survive was the thing the brand was actually built on. A German holidaymaker in 2018 still flew to Mallorca, just on Eurowings or Condor, and the airline that invented that route out of Tegel forty years earlier was a logo on a leftover safety card.

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