Lufthansa leases flight training fleet and school to United

United Aviate Academy, the wholly-owned flight training school of United Airlines (UA, Chicago O’Hare), is to lease a training fleet of twenty-five Cirrus SR20s from Lufthansa Aviation Training (LAT).

This follows a series of agreements between the two flight schools that will also see LAT lease its European Flight Academy (EFA) campus with training equipment at Goodyear, Arizona to the United Aviate Academy with immediate effect. UAA will provide pilot training services on behalf of LAT, which has options to purchase training services from UAA, depending on its own future needs.

Goodyear is one of the oldest pilot training sites, where students have undergone their initial practical training phase. Until the beginning of the pandemic, LAT had trained pilots there for the Lufthansa Group airlines and third parties. However, training at the site was suspended as a result of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and an accompanying significant drop in the demand for new pilots by the Lufthansa Group. LAT is now streamlining its pilot training programme as part of a group-wide restructuring programme.

”Lufthansa has enjoyed many years of successful cooperation with United Airlines as part of Star Alliance. We are glad to be able to emphasise this partnership in the context of our long-established flight training campus in Goodyear. We are convinced that both partners will benefit with regard to their needs – the United Aviate Academy can make full use of a unique campus infrastructure and a modern training fleet while LAT secures access to training capacities in the future in addition to substantially reducing costs in pilot student training”, explained LAT’s Managing Director, Matthias Spohr.

LAT’s head office is based at Munich where it employs around 1,000 people. The customer portfolio currently includes more than 250 airlines, including the Lufthansa Group airlines.