The Latvian Air Baltic will be flying from Stuttgart on behalf of Eurowings from Tuesday. Two Airbus A220-300s are stationed at the largest airport in Baden-Württemberg for the wet lease order. The flight numbers of the Lufthansa subsidiary are used.
According to a report by Airliners.de, the medium-haul jets of the Latvian state carrier are to be used to Vienna, Milan-Malpensa and Hamburg, among others. A Eurowings spokesman confirmed the media report. Furthermore, negotiations are to be held with other airlines about wet lease services.
With this, Air Baltic is likely - at least for the time being - to have outdone its competitor Helvetic Airways. This year there were already rumors that Helvetic could fly for Eurowings with Embraer jets from Stuttgart. Nothing has come of this so far, but it could come in the summer of 2022. At least for the time being, two Air Baltic A220-300s will be in use for Eurowings from Stuttgart.
This wet lease is also viewed critically, because the Lufthansa Group still keeps an enormous number of employees on short-time work. The entire fleet is also not in use. Evil tongues claim - without naming further sources - that the wet lease use of the Latvian jets could be cheaper than in-house operation.
Regardless of this, the Lufthansa Group will very likely take a close look at how the A220-300 "works" in the Eurowings network, because the renewal of the Kranich regional fleet is pending and it has not yet been decided whether to use the A220 like Swiss or ordered the E2 models from Embraer.
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