Interflug

~ the obit ~

East Germany wanted a national airline and could not legally call it what it wanted to call it. The Lufthansa name and crane were tied up in a trademark fight with the West, so in September 1958 the GDR set up Interflug alongside its own Deutsche Lufthansa as a company that could sign contracts without inviting a lawsuit. By 1963 the East German Lufthansa was dissolved and Interflug inherited everything: the routes, the aircraft, the crews.

What it flew was Soviet. Ilyushin propliners at first, then Il-62s on the long haul with Tupolev Tu-134s working Europe, and a fleet of Antonov An-2 biplanes off to one side doing crop spraying. Scheduled service reached roughly forty cities, and the Il-62 went as far as Havana. Traffic peaked in the 1980s at 1,358,700 passengers in 1983, and the fleet still had 39 commercial aircraft in 1990. In 1989 Interflug bought three Airbus A310-300s, which was the first Western metal the airline ever ordered and, as it turned out, the last aircraft it ever ordered at all.

This one died before I had a modem. In April 1991 I was seven years old in Turkey and the country that owned this airline had already stopped existing five months earlier, so everything I know about Interflug is from the archive rather than the air. It reads less like a bankruptcy than like an administrative event that happened to have aircraft attached.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the deal that was not allowed ~

On 1 July 1990 Lufthansa offered to buy 100 percent of Interflug. On paper that was the soft landing: one German airline absorbing the other, keeping the Schönefeld base and most of the staff. On 30 July 1990 the Bundeskartellamt rejected it, because a merged Lufthansa would have held too much of the German market. The competition logic was sound and the outcome was that the only buyer with a reason to buy was forbidden from buying.

After that the airline sat inside the Treuhandanstalt, the agency winding up East German state property, while other buyers were sounded out and none of them closed. Nobody wanted a fleet of Soviet airliners with no Western certification path, flying a route map built for a bloc that had dissolved.

~ the day it died ~

The Treuhand board decided on liquidation on 7 February 1991. Operations continued for another twelve weeks, which meant the airline spent its final season flying a schedule it already knew it would not repeat. The last commercial flight was a Tu-134 from Vienna into Berlin-Schönefeld on 30 April 1991. The workforce had been around 8,000 at its height and roughly a thousand people were taken on by Lufthansa, which is a better ratio than most liquidations manage and still leaves thousands of people out of a job in a region that was losing employers by the week.

~ what got buried with it ~

The three A310s were the most valuable thing left and they went to the Luftwaffe as VIP transports, which is how an East German purchase order ended up carrying West German chancellors. Five Il-18s were bought by former Interflug staff who founded a small airline called Berline, and that lasted until 1994.

What went with it was the last piece of East German civil infrastructure that people outside the country could actually see. The Trabant is the object everyone reaches for when they want to talk about the GDR's industrial output, but a Trabant only ever proved something about the inside of the country. An airline is a claim about the world beyond it, and Interflug's claim was retired in a Treuhand meeting room rather than in a crash or a scandal.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »