Germania

If you spotted at German regional airports in the 2000s and 2010s, you could hardly miss Germania. The Berlin airline was never as well known as Lufthansa or Air Berlin, but from Bremen to Friedrichshafen it flew vacationers to the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands – and for decades it was a significant player in the German leisure flight market. It has been gone since February 2019. This page shows you how Germania came about, which aircraft it flew, how to recognize its jets on old photos and what is left of the airline to this day.

Germania at a glance

Germania was a German leisure and charter airline based in Berlin. It carried the name from June 1986, but its roots go back to 1978. Its business stood on several legs: flights on behalf of tour operators, aircraft with crew for other airlines (wet lease) and, from 2001, scheduled flights of its own that it sold directly to passengers.

In the end Germania carried around four million passengers a year and employed almost 1,400 people in 2017. That put it among the larger German airlines – without ever reaching the name recognition of Condor or TUIfly. Its strength lay in coverage: Germania was based at many smaller airports where the big airlines offered little or nothing.

In early February 2019 it was over. After an insolvency filing the aircraft stayed on the ground, and a few weeks later the sale to investors failed. Germania thus belongs to the series of German airlines that disappeared between 2017 and 2019 – shortly after Air Berlin. An overview of this wave is given in the article on major airline failures in Europe.

The history in stages

Germania doesn’t begin in Berlin but in Cologne. There, Turkish entrepreneurs founded SAT Flug GmbH – Special Air Transport in 1978, a small charter company that began flight operations in September 1978 with a Fokker F27. The Berlin lawyer Hinrich Bischoff later took over SAT and renamed it Germania in 1986. Bischoff shaped the airline until his death in November 2005, after which his widow and son held the majority.

Exciting for Berlin fans is the period around reunification. With the move to Tegel, Germania became a true Berlin airline, and the shuttle between Bonn and Berlin made it a means of transport for ministry officials commuting between the old and new capitals. You can learn more about the airport where Germania was at home for so long in the history of Berlin Tegel.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code ST: appeared in the flight number, so on boarding passes, departure boards and in schedules.
• ICAO code GMI: appeared in the air traffic control flight plan and shows up today in old ADS-B logs and flight data archives.
• Callsign GERMANIA: how the crew identified itself on the radio.

This matters when analyzing old data: the codes were stable for many years, but the flight numbers were not. Germania often flew for other airlines under their flight numbers, for example on wet lease for Air Berlin, which ended in October 2013. A Germania jet in an old photo therefore didn’t necessarily operate an ST flight.

The Germania fleet

Hardly any German airline went through as many generations of aircraft as Germania. The common thread over three decades was the Boeing 737 – until the Airbus A319 gradually took over the lead role from 2011.

Type	Period	Spotter note
Fokker F27	from 1978 (as SAT)	Turboprop of the early years, only on very old photos now
Sud Aviation Caravelle	from 1980 (as SAT)	Three used examples from LTU, engines mounted at the rear of the fuselage
Boeing 727-100	from 1985	Two aircraft from Hapag-Lloyd, three-engine jet with a T-tail
Boeing 737-300	from 1987	13 examples, the first generation of the Germania 737
Boeing 737-700	1998–2019	First aircraft D-AGEM, a handful still in service at the end
Fokker 100	2002–2008	19 used jets, originally from US Airways
Airbus A319	2011–2019	In the end the most important type in the fleet
Airbus A321	2013–2019	The largest Germania jets, some in alltours livery
Airbus A320neo	ordered, never flown	25 ordered, delivery planned from 2020

At the shutdown in February 2019 the fleet consisted of just over 30 aircraft. The exact number depends on how you count: some A319s flew for the Swiss Germania Flug and for Bulgarian Eagle, and an A320 was in service at Sundair. At its core, though, it was around 20 A319s, a handful of A321s and four to five Boeing 737-700s.

The Boeing 737-700 has a special history at Germania. As early as 1995 the airline ordered twelve aircraft of the new 737 generation. During the delivery flight of the first aircraft from Everett to Berlin Tegel in March 1998, the crew even set a distance record in this jet’s weight class. The manufacturer of the 737 family is Boeing.

The Fokker 100, by contrast, remained an episode. In 2002 Germania took over a total of 19 examples that had previously flown for US Airways and also used them on behalf of other airlines. In October 2008 the last Fokkers left the fleet. If you want to know more about the Dutch manufacturer, you’ll find it on the page on Fokker.

From 2011 Germania bet on Airbus: the first of initially eight A319s arrived in February 2011, the first A321 in November 2013. The 25 A320neos ordered in 2016 were meant as the next generation – because of the insolvency not a single one reached Germania.

How to recognize Germania

Because Germania no longer exists, you’ll only find its aircraft on photos and in archives. When sorting old pictures, a few features that together give a reliable assignment will help you.

Some Germania jets did not wear the airline’s own look. Two A321s flew in the colors of the tour operator alltours from 2013 to 2015 (D-ASTD and D-ASTV), and the A319 D-AHIL advertised Kassel Airport in 2014/2015. The 737-700 D-AGER received a special livery in 2016 for the 30th anniversary of the Germania brand. Such aircraft are easily misfiled on old pictures – here too, the registration helps.

The easiest way to tell the A319 from the A321 is by fuselage length and the number of emergency exits over the wing. How this works across the whole family is explained in the guide Telling the A318, A319, A320 and A321 apart. The German registrations of the fleet follow the weight-class system explained in the article on German aircraft registrations.

Subsidiaries, brands and stakes

Germania was more than a single airline. Over the years a small web of brands and companies grew – important for spotters, because the same aircraft could show up under different names.

Brand or company	Period	What was behind it
Germania Express (gexx)	from 2003	Low-cost brand for direct flights, from 2012 also with the acquired flynext brand
dba stake	2005	From late March to early July 2005 Germania held the majority of dba
Gambia Bird	2012–2014	Gambian airline for which Germania operated an A319 for a time
Germania Technik Brandenburg	from 2011	The airline’s maintenance subsidiary
Germania Flug AG (Switzerland)	2014–2019	Started in 2015 for Hotelplan under the name HolidayJet, today Chair Airlines
Bulgarian Eagle	2017–2019	Bulgarian subsidiary for wet lease, also insolvent in March 2019

The Swiss subsidiary is the only piece of Germania that still flies today. It wasn’t directly affected by the German parent’s bankruptcy, got new owners and has carried the name Chair since June 2019. If you spot in Zurich, you are in a sense seeing Germania’s last descendant.

Stations and routes

Germania’s network was geared toward vacation destinations: the Mediterranean, the Canary Islands and the Balearics, plus other destinations in Europe. It was typical for the airline to base aircraft at many German airports, not just at one hub. In the end these airports were among those it served:

• Berlin: Schönefeld as home airport and Tegel, where the operational headquarters were located for a long time – now replaced by BER
• Northern Germany: Bremen, Hamburg, Rostock-Laage and Münster/Osnabrück
• Central and eastern Germany: Dresden, Erfurt-Weimar and Düsseldorf
• Southern Germany: Nuremberg, Munich and Friedrichshafen

Stations abroad were added, such as Palma de Mallorca and Pristina. Especially at the smaller airports, Germania was often one of the most important providers in leisure traffic. The gap after the bankruptcy was correspondingly noticeable. At some airports other airlines stepped in; Sundair, for example, based aircraft in Bremen and Dresden in 2019 and took over routes there.

From November 2001 Germania also sold scheduled flights of its own, the first of which ran from Tegel to Frankfurt. That put the airline between two worlds: half charter carrier for tour operators, half provider of individual seats. What distinguishes these two models is explained in the article Charter vs. scheduled flights.

The end: insolvency in 2019

The problems became public in early 2019. In early January Germania reported a short-term financing need and looked for backers. At the end of January employees learned that their salaries could not be paid on time. A few days later it was over.

For passengers the end came overnight: booked flights no longer took place from February 5, 2019. For spotters the end meant that a familiar airline vanished from the schedules from one day to the next – and that the fleet moved to other owners and operators over the following months.

Germania in spotters’ everyday life today

You can no longer see Germania live today. The airline lives on in three forms: in old photos, in the aircraft that now fly for other airlines, and in the Swiss Chair Airlines.

Many former Germania aircraft kept flying after 2019, with a new registration and livery. If you want to track them down, you need the serial number (MSN): it stays the same through all re-registrations while the registration changes. That way you can connect a sighting today with an old Germania photo – a nice entry for any collection. How old such an aircraft is, you can find out through the guide Finding out an aircraft’s age.

If you visit the airports of back then today, you’ll find good conditions in many places. The observation deck in Bremen, the observation deck in Dresden and the observation deck in Nuremberg are at former Germania stations. In Berlin the observation deck at BER is a good choice, even though Tegel and Schönefeld in their old form are history.

Common mix-ups

• Mixing up Germania and Germanwings – two completely different airlines with similar names.
• Taking Germania for an Air Berlin subsidiary – Germania was independent but flew on wet lease for Air Berlin for a time.
• Equating Germania Flug with Germania – the Swiss subsidiary was a company of its own and still flies today as Chair.
• Expecting all Germania jets in Germania livery – some A321s wore alltours colors.
• Taking SAT and Germania for two airlines – SAT was the predecessor from which Germania emerged in 1986.
• Counting the A320neo in the Germania fleet – the 25 ordered neos never came to Germania.

Conclusion

For over three decades Germania was a fixture of German leisure flying – from the Cologne charter operation SAT through the Berlin years at Tegel to the A319 fleet based at many regional airports. The sudden end in February 2019 turned an everyday sighting into archive material overnight. Anyone who sorts old photos today, looks for former Germania jets at new operators or spots Chair Airlines in Zurich keeps the history of this airline alive.