LTU International Airways

If you stood at Düsseldorf Airport in the 1980s and 1990s, you couldn’t miss LTU: red-and-white widebodies taking off in the morning toward the Mediterranean, the Caribbean or Thailand. LTU is history today – the airline was absorbed into Air Berlin between 2007 and 2011. For spotters it remains exciting anyway: as Germany’s only TriStar airline, as an early Airbus A330 operator and as a prime example of how a leisure airline from the Rhineland shaped German holiday travel for decades.

LTU at a glance

LTU was a German leisure airline headquartered and based in Düsseldorf. The company was founded on October 20, 1955, in Frankfurt as Lufttransport-Union. To avoid confusion with a similarly named firm, it was called just LTU as early as 1956. The first flight went from Frankfurt to Catania in Sicily in March 1956 – a destination that fits the later profile well: sun, beach, package holiday.

An important name from the early days is Kurt Conle. He joined as a German shareholder so that LTU could obtain a German operating license, and the Conle family shaped the company for decades. On January 1, 1960, the headquarters moved to Düsseldorf – and LTU stayed there until the end.

Over the decades an entire tourism group grew up around the airline: from 1964 there was its own tour operator, Transair LTU, and later brands such as Meier’s Weltreisen, Tjaereborg and Jahn Reisen were added. LTU also founded subsidiaries in Munich and on Mallorca. In 2006 LTU carried around 5.7 million passengers, and in 2007 just under 2,800 people worked for the company.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code LT: appeared in the flight number, so on departure boards, tickets and boarding passes.
• ICAO code LTU: appeared in the flight plan filed with air traffic control.
• Callsign LTU: this is how the crew identified itself on the radio.

For spotters digitizing old logbooks or slides, this is helpful: a note like “LT 123” or “LTU 123” unambiguously points to the Düsseldorf leisure airline. How flight numbers, callsigns and registrations relate is explained in the guide Understanding aircraft registrations, and the German D- system in the article German aircraft registrations. And if you want to know which routes a particular aircraft flew in the past, you will find tips under Looking up an aircraft’s flight history.

The fleet over time

Hardly any German airline flew as many different types as LTU. The fleet history reads like a cross-section of commercial aviation in the second half of the 20th century.

Era	Key types	Use	Spotter note
1955–1960s	Vickers Viking, Douglas DC-4, Fokker F27, Bristol 170	Short and medium haul	Propeller era, now only in historic photos
from 1965	Sud Aviation Caravelle	the airline’s first jets	Rear-mounted engines, triangular cabin windows
from 1969	Fokker F28 Fellowship	Short haul	LTU is considered the type’s launch customer
1973–1996	Lockheed L-1011 TriStar (including L-1011-500)	Medium and long haul	Germany’s only TriStar airline
1980s–2000s	Boeing 757-200 and 767-300ER	Medium and long haul, also at the subsidiaries	757 slim and tall-legged, 767 a twin-engine widebody with two aisles
1990s	McDonnell Douglas MD-11	Long haul	three engines, winglets at the wingtips
from mid-1990s	Airbus A330-200/-300, A320, A321	entire network	final fleet, passed to Air Berlin in 2011

At the end of the 1960s LTU switched to jets. The Sud Aviation Caravelle led the way, followed by the Fokker F28 Fellowship. The big leap came in 1973 with the first widebody.

TriStar: the trademark of the 1970s to 1990s

On May 29, 1973, LTU took delivery of its first Lockheed L-1011 TriStar. That made the Düsseldorf airline the only German operator of this type. In 1980 examples of the shortened long-range L-1011-500 version were added. In May 1996 LTU finally retired the TriStar.

If you are sorting old photos, you recognize the TriStar by the center engine, which sits in an S-shaped inlet duct in the tail – the air intake is on top in front of the vertical stabilizer, while the engine itself is deep in the rear fuselage. On the McDonnell Douglas MD-11, which LTU also flew from 1991, the third engine, by contrast, sits clearly visible in the vertical stabilizer. Both types date from the era of the big three-engine jets: Lockheed is now part of Lockheed Martin, while McDonnell Douglas was absorbed into Boeing.

An episode from this period shows how tight fleet planning can be: because the delivery of the MD-11 was delayed, LTU temporarily leased a Boeing 747-200 from Evergreen in the early 1990s. A 747 under an LTU flight number – that is a real find for logbook collectors today.

Boeing 757 and 767

In the 1980s twin-engine Boeing jets joined the fleet. The Boeing 757-200 flew at LTU and the subsidiaries on medium-haul routes, and the Munich-based LTU-Süd operated three 757s with a combined 597 seats. From 1989 the Boeing 767-300ER supplemented the long-haul side. How to tell the two outwardly similar types apart is shown in the comparison Telling the Boeing 757 and 767 apart.

Airbus: the last LTU fleet

In the mid-1990s LTU began converting its fleet to Airbus. On long-haul routes the Airbus A330 took the lead role – first the A330-300, and around 2001 also the shorter A330-200 with greater range. On short and medium haul the A320 and A321 flew. In February 2011, shortly before the final end, the fleet consisted of 24 aircraft: eleven A320-200s, ten A330-200s and three A330-300s. The manufacturer of all three types is Airbus.

The A330 looks very similar to the four-engine A340. When you are sorting old photos, the guide A330 or A340? helps – at LTU the answer is easy, though, because the airline flew only the twin-engine A330.

How to recognize LTU

LTU’s livery was red and white and changed surprisingly little over the decades. It was precisely this consistency that made it a trademark of German leisure air travel: anyone who saw the colors and the large “LTU” titles knew immediately who was taking off. The Munich subsidiary initially flew in a similar look, though with blue instead of red.

In 2007 LTU got a new look. The red stayed, but white became the dominant color, and the shapes looked more modern. Interesting for livery collectors: Air Berlin subsequently adapted its own livery to this LTU design. After the takeover there were also transitional solutions – four A330-200s with the registrations D-ALPA to D-ALPD wore a mixed livery until May 2009, including “LTU.com” on the lower side of the fuselage. Such intermediate states are typical cases for the guide to hybrid and mixed liveries; how airlines later revive old designs is shown in the overview of retro liveries.

Owners, crises and the end

For a long time LTU was in the hands of the Conle family. Around 1990 the state bank WestLB came in with a good third. Around the turn of the millennium the Conle family withdrew completely, and Switzerland’s SAirGroup – the parent company of Swissair – took 49.9 percent. Another stake was held by a holding company backed by the retail group Rewe.

In 2001 LTU ran into serious trouble: the SAirGroup went insolvent in the fall, and at the same time passenger numbers collapsed after the September 11 attacks. A state guarantee that WestLB took on helped it through the crisis; the Rewe group remained an important shareholder with 40 percent, and the former Swiss shares were initially held in trust. In 2006 an investor group around Hans Rudolf Wöhrl and Jürgen Marbach finally came in, and Rewe sold its shares the same year.

In March 2007 Air Berlin announced the takeover, and in August 2007 the Federal Cartel Office gave the green light – without conditions. LTU was attractive to Air Berlin mainly because of its long-haul business: with the A330s and the strong position at Düsseldorf Airport, the Berlin airline suddenly had a long-haul program. In October 2007 LTU also opened a long-haul base at Berlin-Tegel.

The integration happened step by step:

• Narrowbody aircraft were gradually repainted in Air Berlin colors, while the widebodies initially kept flying as LTU.
• July 2008: Air Berlin announced that it would give up the LTU brand entirely.
• August 16, 2009: the last aircraft in classic LTU livery left Düsseldorf for repainting in Abu Dhabi.
• October 2009: flights under the LTU callsign ended.
• April 1, 2011: all staff moved to Air Berlin, and all flights ran under the Air Berlin operating license.

Air Berlin itself ceased flight operations in October 2017. The full story is told in the article on the history of Air Berlin, and the bigger picture is shown in the overview of major airline collapses in Europe.

Routes and destinations

From the very beginning LTU was geared toward vacation destinations. In the 1970s the network already reached far beyond the Mediterranean: Los Angeles, Miami and New York, the Caribbean with destinations such as Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, plus Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Thailand and Kenya. From the late 1990s the long-haul network concentrated mainly on Florida, the Caribbean, the Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

That made LTU a leisure airline in the classic sense – with fixed departures for package tourists, but also with individual seats for independent travelers. The difference between the two models is explained in the article Charter flights vs. scheduled flights. Today other companies share this market, such as Condor, TUIfly or Eurowings.

Spotting LTU today – is it still possible?

No aircraft has been in scheduled service in LTU colors since 2009. Still, there are a few ways for spotters to keep the airline alive:

Düsseldorf is still the place where LTU history is most tangible. If you want to spot there, the guide Plane spotting in Düsseldorf helps you choose a location, and a convenient place to start is the observation deck at Düsseldorf Airport.

Common mix-ups

• Taking LTU for a Lufthansa subsidiary – LTU was independent and never belonged to the Lufthansa Group.
• Mixing up the TriStar and MD-11 – on the TriStar the third engine sits in the rear fuselage, on the MD-11 in the vertical stabilizer.
• Equating LTU-Süd with LTU – the Munich subsidiary initially flew with blue instead of red accents.
• Taking the new LTU look for Air Berlin – from 2007 the two liveries looked similar because Air Berlin adopted the LTU design.
• Taking LT for Lithuania – the IATA code LT is purely an airline designator and has nothing to do with the country abbreviation.
• Dating the end to 2007 – the takeover happened in 2007, the brand disappeared in 2009, the company only in 2011.

Conclusion

LTU was more than just a leisure airline: over decades the Düsseldorf airline brought millions of vacationers from western Germany into the sun, was the only German company to fly the TriStar and was among the early A330 operators. After the takeover by Air Berlin it disappeared step by step – but in photo archives, logbooks and registration histories it remains present for spotters to this day.