Airlines in Germany
The first regular commercial air service in post-1918 Germany began on 5 February, 1919, when aircraft of Deutsche Luft-Reederei started carrying mail, newspapers, and passengers between Berlinl-Johannisthal and Weimar. DLT, which had been formed the previous year, had rapidly risen to the forefront among the spattering of embryo aviation companies that had come to the surface in Germanyünde in April.
By mid-1920, the DLR fleet comprised seventy-one single-engine aircraft, almost all of them ex-military types such as the LVG and AEG, and thirteen twin-engine Friedrichshafen FF45 and GIIIA aircraft, the latter capable of carrying up to six passengers as well as two crew, mail and cargo. In August that year, the airline inaugurated the first international route from Malmö to Amsterdam, via Warnemünde, Hamburg and Bremen, in cooperation with KLM and DDL, the Dutch and Danish airlines.
Further expansion took place in 1921, when the consortium of businesses involved in DLR – AEG, HAPAG, Zeppelin – formed a holding company called Aero-Union AG. In November, this, together with DLR, became joint owner and representative of a new Berlin-based airline, the Deutsch-Russiche Verkehrs-gesellschaft DbH, also known as Deruluft. On 1 May, 1922, the company began services between Königsberg and Moscow. Two days later, DLR aircraft also began a regular service to Great Britain, landing initially in a meadow near Folkestone.
By this time, Aero-Union was feeling the severe effects of recession, and its aircraft fleet was reduced to 45. However, it managed to survive while other, smaller companies went into oblivion, and by 1923 its only serious competitor in Germany was an airline owned by the Junkers Aircraft Company, Junkers Luftverkehr. Early in 1923, Aero-Union and its associated companies, together with Lloyd Luftdienst GmbH, joined their forces and resources into a single large company, Deutscher Aero Lloyd AG, which received considerable financial backing from shipping companies, banks and various industrial concerns; in October, the new company set up a base at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, which was officially opened on 8 October, 1923 and which was also used by Junkers Luftverkehr.
During 1925, both Aero Lloyd and the Junkers concern existed mainly by virtue of considerable government subsidies, and in October that year the German Transport Ministry took over 80% of the shares of Junkers Luftverkehr as a means of pressuring the two companies to merge. This step, inevitable in the prevailing climate of financial insecurity, led to the formation of Deutsche Luft Hansa AG (it should be noted that “Lufthansa” was a later spelling) which began operations on 6 April, 1926. The first scheduled flight by the new airline was made by a Dornier Komet III, which flew from Berlin to Zurich via Halle, Erfurt and Stuttgart.
Luft Hansa operated initially over eight routes, most of which were inaugurated by the end of April. The aircraft types in use were the Junkers F.13, the Dornier Komet III, the Dornier Wal flying boat, the Fokker F.II and F.III, and the Junkers G.24, which was basically a scaled-up version of the F.13.
On 1 May, 1926, Luft Hansa began the world’s first passenger night service from Berlin to Königsberg and cut the flying time to Moscow to fifteen hours. Two days later, the airline’s Dornier Wal opened a flying boat service from Stettin to Stockholm, and on 25 May a service was started from Berlin to Paris via Cologne in conjunction with the Lignes Farman and the Société Générale des Transports Aériens.
The fortunes of German civil aviation took a big upturn in the summer of 1926, when the “London Agreement” of 1921 – which forbade the manufacture of aircraft in Germany, thus forcing manufacturers to set up factories in Russia, Denmark and Italy – was finally lifted. The Germans were at last able to centralize their resources, and with aircraft supply assured Luft Hansa entered into bilateral agreements with several European countries, negotiating new international routes. Ten new routes were agreed upon at the 16th Conference of the International Air Traffic Association – of which the old DLR had been a founding member – that August in Berlin.
During the next three years, Luft Hansa airliners operated regular services to Czechoslovakia, Norway, Italy, Spain, Russia, Great Britain, Denmark, and France, and in 1930 a regular airmail service was opened between Vienna and Istanbul via Budapest, Belgrade and Sofia. In the following year, the world’s biggest landplane, the Junkers G.38, made its debut on the Berlin-Amsterdam-London route; it was the forerunner of a whole range of new types that would put Luft Hansa in the forefront of European commercial aviation.
The most famous of these was the Junkers Ju.52, which entered Luft Hansa service in 1932; no fewer than 231 were eventually to pass through the airline’s hands, although most of these would be operated on behalf of the Luftwaffe between 1939 and 1945. Thirty-eight Ju.52’s were in service by the end of 1934, the year in which Luft Hansa began a scheduled service to Warsaw, and with these aircraft the average cruising speed on international routes was raised virtually overnight from 100mph to 150mph!
Much of Luft Hansa’s revenue came from day and night airmail services, until in 1933 the search for a fast mail carrier produced the Heinkel He.70, which was aerodynamically the most advanced aircraft of its day. Appropriately named “Blitz” (Lightning), it set up an impressive series of closed circuit speed-with-payload records; powered by a single 750hp BMW engine, it had a maximum speed of 224mph at 13,000ft and range of nearly 500 miles. Twenty-eight of the new aircraft went into service with Lufthansa (as the airline was now known) and these began a series of Blitz routes on 16 June 1934, linking Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and Frankfurt. Eleven such routes were in operation by the end of 1935.
In February 1935, Lufthansa made its first of a series of trial flights from Berlin to Cairo, using a Junkers Ju.52/3m. The return flight took 16˝ hours and was accomplished on the same day, 20 February, the aircraft flying via Budapest, Athens, and Alexandria. At this stage in its development, Lufthansa probably led the world in night- and blind-flight techniques, including controlled descent through cloud.
In 1936, it was decided to liquidate Deruluft, its routes to
be taken over jointly by Lufthansa and Aeroflot. Lufthansa
took control of the Berlin-Danzig-Königsberg-Kovno-Riga-Reval-Helsinki sector in
September 1936, but because of protracted negotiations with Aeroflot Deruluft actually
remained in operation on other sectors until March 22, 1941 – exactly three months
before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In
1937, exploratory flights were made by Ju.52’s to Athens, Rhodes, and the Middle East
to see if it would be possible to open a route to Asia via Baghdad, Teheran and Kabul, but
this and other expansion schemes were rendered impossible by the outbreak of hostilities
in late 1939.
