Austrian Airlines ends A319 operations

Austrian Airlines (OS, Vienna) ended A319-100 operations on January 1, 2022, with all seven of the type now set to be sold to sister carrier Lufthansa CityLine (CL, Munich).

OE-LDE (msn 2494) was the last A319 to fly for Austrian Airlines. On January 1, it from Tirana to Vienna and has remained parked at the Austrian gateway since then. The penultimate unit, OE-LDD (msn 2416), was phased out at the end of November 2021 and has been undergoing pre-redelivery maintenance at Bratislava airport since December 21, 2021. The remaining five A319s were retired during the course of 2021 and have already been registered by Lufthansa CityLine, although they have yet to enter into service.

Austrian said it would retire the A319s by 2022 in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as it sought means to reduce fleet expenses. The ch-aviation fleets advanced module shows that other A320ceo Family aircraft continue to form the backbone of Austrian Airlines’ fleet including twenty-nine A320-200s, three A321-100s, and three A321-200s. Its regional fleet comprises seventeen E190s, while on the widebody front, Austrian operates three B767-300(ER)s and six B777-200(ER)s. The airline has yet to confirm that it will take any new-generation aircraft from the pool ordered by parent Lufthansa Group or from other sources.

For its part, Lufthansa CityLine operates eleven A319-100s, including five already acquired from Austrian Airlines and another six transferred from Lufthansa (LH, Frankfurt Int’l). The airline deploys the smallest A320 Family jets on behalf of its parent company (which operates a further twenty-three A319s under its own AOC).