Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter

Propeller aircraft in Air Berlin red? If you stood at German airports between 2008 and 2017, you saw them – and probably did not know that behind the Dash 8-400s was not Air Berlin itself but a regional airline from Dortmund: the Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter, LGW for short. Its story runs from a small flight school to a turboprop fleet for two of Germany’s biggest airlines. This page shows you how to assign LGW cleanly in photos, logbooks and old tracker data.

LGW at a glance

The Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter was a German regional airline that existed from 1980 to 2020. It was founded by Bernd Walter, who ran a flight school at Dortmund Airport. Out of this setting grew first a charter and air taxi operation with small aircraft, and from 1992 also its own network of scheduled flights within Germany.

LGW became known only in the second half of its life, though – and mostly under someone else’s name. From 2007 the airline worked closely with Air Berlin and flew the Dash 8-400 turboprops for it. After the Air Berlin insolvency in 2017, LGW moved to the Lufthansa Group and flew on wet lease for Eurowings. In 2019 Berlin’s Zeitfracht Group bought the company, and a year later the COVID slump put an end to it.

For spotters, LGW is thus a typical case of an “airline behind the airline”: the design on the aircraft showed a different name than that of the operator. If you sort photos from this period, you should know that.

Codes and callsign

• ICAO code LGW: appeared in the flight plan filed with air traffic control and thus also on flight trackers when LGW operated a flight.
• Callsign WALTER: this is how the crews identified themselves on the radio – a direct nod to the founder’s name.
• IATA code HE: is given as the company’s IATA code but hardly played a role in everyday use. From 2009 the flights carried Air Berlin flight numbers (AB), later Eurowings flight numbers (EW).

Watch out for confusion: LGW is also the IATA code of London’s Gatwick Airport. That is pure coincidence, because ICAO airline codes and IATA airport codes are separate systems. If you find “LGW” in old logbooks or databases, check whether the field means an airline or an airport.

From flight school to regional airline

LGW’s first years had little to do with the later turboprop operation. After its founding in 1980, the company offered charter and air taxi flights, that is, on-demand trips for business travelers and small groups. Added to this were photo and sightseeing flights as well as an island service to the North Sea. For this LGW initially used a single-engine Cessna U206G and, from 1988, also the twin-engine Britten-Norman Islander.

In 1992 came the step into scheduled service. LGW now flew scheduled domestic flights. After reunification, destinations such as Erfurt, Hannover, Paderborn/Lippstadt and Rostock were added; most of these routes were later discontinued. From this time the backbone of the fleet was the Cessna 404 and above all the Dornier 228 – a robust high-wing aircraft with two turboprops and around 19 seats that suited short routes and smaller airports well. One well-known link ran from Berlin-Tempelhof Airport to Hannover. It operated twice a day until the end of September 1998, when the ICE rail line between the two cities made the flight redundant.

In the 2000s the network included Dresden, Leipzig/Halle, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Berlin-Tegel and Sylt, among others, plus feeder flights to Düsseldorf. In 2003 LGW carried up to 50,000 passengers on its scheduled flights – a manageable number that shows LGW remained a genuine niche provider until then.

Period	Phase	Typical aircraft
1980–1991	Charter, air taxi and sightseeing flights from Dortmund	Cessna U206G, from 1988 Britten-Norman Islander
1992–2008	Own domestic scheduled flights	Cessna 404, mainly Dornier 228
2007/2008–2017	Partner of Air Berlin	Dash 8-400 in Air Berlin livery
2017–2020	Wet lease for Eurowings	Dash 8-400, in 2017/18 also A319/A320

Partner of Air Berlin: the Dash 8 years

The big turning point came in fall 2007. LGW became a regional partner of Air Berlin, at the time Germany’s second-largest airline. LGW flights could now also be booked through Air Berlin, and LGW gave up some of its own routes such as Dresden, Leipzig/Halle and Nuremberg for it. The connections to Stuttgart and Berlin-Tegel ended in September 2008. In 2008 Air Berlin added the Dash 8-400 to its regional fleet, and from November 2008 LGW flew ten of them. They replaced the Dornier 228.

From 2009 LGW almost completely disappeared from the outside: Air Berlin came in as a shareholder, and the company gave up its own branding and flew only under Air Berlin flight numbers. According to records, the last scheduled flight under its own name went from Sylt to Düsseldorf on January 14, 2009. After that, the LGW turboprops were simply “Air Berlin’s propeller planes” to passengers.

The fleet grew in the following years. In spring 2015 the number of Dash 8-400s rose from twelve to seventeen. A short excursion into the jet world remained an episode: in 2013 LGW took over three Embraer 190s from the Austrian sister Niki but gave them up again in November 2013.

At the end of May 2017 Air Berlin announced it would take over LGW completely for a symbolic price; after the Federal Cartel Office’s approval, the purchase was completed in June 2017. A few weeks later, on August 15, 2017, Air Berlin itself filed for insolvency. You can read the whole story of the collapse on the page for Air Berlin and in the retrospective on the history of Air Berlin.

Lufthansa, Eurowings and the A320 episode

After the Air Berlin insolvency, the Lufthansa Group negotiated over parts of the business. On October 12, 2017, it agreed with the insolvency administrator on a package that included LGW. The European Commission approved the takeover of LGW in December 2017, and it was completed in January 2018. Lufthansa withdrew the deal with Niki planned in parallel after concerns from Brussels.

For LGW this meant a new client: from late October 2017 the airline flew on wet lease for Eurowings, that is, with its own crews and its own operating license but in Eurowings’ network and under Eurowings flight numbers. A brief peculiarity arose in the process: LGW additionally operated jets from the Airbus A320 family, including the A319. The Airbus aircraft moved to other operators in the Eurowings orbit by the end of 2018. What remained were the Dash 8-400s, which over time were repainted into the Eurowings design.

For spotters, this phase is a rewarding puzzle. An A320 in the Eurowings look from winter 2017/2018 may have been flown by LGW – recognizable by the ICAO code LGW in the tracker data of the time or by notes in photo databases. You can find more on strategies for following a particular aircraft over the years in the guide Tracking an aircraft by registration.

Zeitfracht takes over – and the abrupt end

On February 20, 2019, Eurowings announced that the Lufthansa Group was selling LGW to Berlin’s Zeitfracht Group. The change of ownership took effect on April 1, 2019. At that point LGW was flying 17 Dash 8-400s, and the long-term wet-lease contract with Eurowings continued. For Eurowings the move fit its own strategy of standardizing the short-haul fleet on Airbus jets.

Zeitfracht already owned Cologne’s WDL Aviation and had bigger plans for LGW. The plan was to gradually replace the Dash 8-400s with Embraer 190 jets from 2020. From fall 2019, LGW and WDL also operated together under the brand German Airways. This phase did not last long: the COVID pandemic brought air travel almost to a standstill in spring 2020.

Eurowings then terminated all wet-lease contracts – not just the one with LGW. The flights for Eurowings ended on March 24, 2020. Between April 8 and 18, 2020, the 15 remaining Dash 8-400s were ferried from Düsseldorf and Saarbrücken to Bratislava. The aircraft did not belong to LGW but were rented from the lessor Nordic Aviation Capital and were on average around twelve years old.

On April 22, 2020, LGW applied to the Düsseldorf district court for insolvency proceedings under self-administration. At that point around 350 people were still working for the airline, most of them in the cockpit and cabin. In June 2020 it became known that Zeitfracht was winding LGW down. How LGW’s end fits into the series of European airline collapses is put in context by the post Major airline collapses in Europe.

The fleet at a glance

Type	Period	Role	Spotter note
Cessna U206G / Britten-Norman Islander / Cessna 404	1980s to 1990s	Charter, island service, later also scheduled	Hardly documented, true archive rarities
Dornier 228	1992–2008	Backbone of scheduled service	Small high-wing aircraft with a boxy fuselage
Dash 8-400	2008–2020	Regional fleet for Air Berlin and Eurowings	First Air Berlin, then Eurowings design
Embraer 190	2013	Briefly taken over from Niki	In the fleet for only a few months
Airbus A319/A320	2017–2018	Wet lease for Eurowings	Eurowings look, operator recognizable only via tracker data

The Dash 8-400 is the type almost everyone associates with LGW. It was originally built by Bombardier in Toronto, and today the program belongs to De Havilland Canada. With a cruise speed well above that of classic turboprops, it was well suited to domestic routes where jets would have been economically too large. The exact seating of LGW’s aircraft is given as a good 70 seats, depending on the source.

How to recognize LGW

In the Dash 8 era, LGW hardly had a look of its own. You therefore have to recognize the airline by type, period and details:

1. The type: A Dash 8-400 in Air Berlin or Eurowings design from 2008 to 2020 is almost always an LGW aircraft. No other German company flew Dash 8s for these two brands in that period.
2. The design: Until 2017 a red tail with the white Air Berlin logo and the lowercase “airberlin,” afterward the Eurowings livery.
3. The registration: German registration with D-. On the Air Berlin Dash 8s, registrations of the series D-ABQ.. were common, such as D-ABQE.
4. The tracker data: If you evaluate old ADS-B recordings or timetable data, the ICAO code LGW or the callsign WALTER reveals the operator.

How to reliably tell a Dash 8-400 from an ATR 72 – the most important turboprop pair at German airports – is shown in the guide Telling turboprops apart. In short: both are high-wing aircraft with a T-tail, but the Dash 8 has very long landing gear legs that retract into the engine nacelles, and a noticeably longer fuselage. The ATR 72, by contrast, retracts its main gear into fairings on the fuselage.

LGW in Dortmund and Düsseldorf

LGW’s roots lie in Dortmund. The airport there was still a small regional airfield in the 1980s – exactly the setting in which a flight school with an air taxi operation could thrive. If you want to spot in Dortmund today, the guide Plane spotting in Dortmund shows you the best places. You will no longer see LGW aircraft there, but turboprops and regional traffic are still part of the picture.

In later years the focus was in Düsseldorf. LGW was finally headquartered and based there, and the Dash 8s flew from there for Air Berlin and Eurowings. A classic place for photos from this time was the observation deck at Düsseldorf Airport; an overview of the airport is given on the page for Düsseldorf Airport.

Common mix-ups

• Taking LGW for London Gatwick – as an ICAO airline code LGW stands for the Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter, as an IATA airport code for Gatwick.
• Logging a Dash 8 in Air Berlin design as an Air Berlin operation – LGW flew it, Air Berlin was the marketer and name giver.
• Equating the ex-LGW with today’s German Airways – today’s German Airways is the former WDL Aviation.
• Automatically assigning Eurowings A320s from 2017/18 to Eurowings – LGW flew some of them on wet lease.
• Confusing the Dash 8-400 with the ATR 72 – both have a T-tail; the main gear in the engine nacelles and the longer fuselage point to the Dash 8.
• Taking LGW for a Lufthansa creation – Lufthansa was the owner for only a little over a year; the airline comes from Dortmund and is much older.

Conclusion

The Luftfahrtgesellschaft Walter is one of the most inconspicuous and at the same time most interesting airlines in recent German aviation history. It began as a flight school offshoot in Dortmund, flew small turboprops domestically for decades and then became a service provider in the background – first for Air Berlin, then for Eurowings. Three changes of ownership in two years and the COVID crisis ended its story in 2020. For spotters the lesson remains: design and operator are two different things, and with turboprops in particular a second look pays off.