Aegean Airlines

If you stand at a German airport in summer, sooner or later you will see a white Airbus with blue “AEGEAN” titles and a Greek SX- registration. Aegean Airlines is Greece’s largest airline and has been in Star Alliance since 2010 – in jet service flying only the Airbus A320 family. Sounds like an easy sighting, but there is depth to it: two liveries, two engine generations, two fuselage lengths, special liveries and a subsidiary called Olympic Air. This page shows you how to classify Aegean cleanly.

Aegean Airlines at a glance

Aegean Airlines is Greece’s largest airline and is headquartered in the Greater Athens area. Its roots go back to the late 1980s: under the name Aegean Aviation, the company initially flew business aircraft. Scheduled service began in May 1999 – with two Avro RJ100s on the routes from Athens to Heraklion and Thessaloniki. The four-engine Avro RJ family has long been history at Aegean, just like the later Boeing 737-300s and 737-400s.

In the years that followed, Aegean grew through acquisitions: Air Greece joined in 1999, Cronus Airlines in 2001. In 2005, the close partnership with Lufthansa began, and on June 30, 2010, admission to Star Alliance followed. The biggest step was the takeover of its competitor Olympic Air: the European Commission still blocked an initial merger in early 2011, but approved the purchase in October 2013.

Today Aegean flies from the hubs Athens and Thessaloniki, plus bases in Larnaca on Cyprus and on Crete, among others. The network covers Greece, large parts of Europe and destinations in North Africa and the Middle East. In 2025, according to published figures, the Aegean group carried around 17 million passengers.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code A3: appears in the flight number, so on the departure board, in the ticket and in the airport’s flight schedule.
• ICAO code AEE: appears in the air traffic control flight plan and on most flight trackers.
• Callsign AEGEAN: this is how the crew identifies itself on the radio.

The difference between flight number and callsign is especially important with Aegean because the subsidiary Olympic Air has its own codes: OA as the IATA code, OAL as the ICAO code and the callsign OLYMPIC. Many Olympic flights are also sold under an A3 flight number. What these codes are about is explained in the guides to IATA and ICAO codes and to the difference between callsign and flight number.

The fleet: Airbus A320 family

In jet service, Aegean is a pure Airbus airline. There are no widebodies, and no Boeings anymore either. According to the available fleet overviews, the fleet in 2026 looks roughly like this:

Type	Number (as of 2026)	Seats	Spotter hint
Airbus A320	around 24	174	First generation, some with sharklets; being replaced step by step
Airbus A320neo	around 21	180	In service since late 2019, first carrier of the new livery
Airbus A321	3	around 206	Oldest and rarest variant in the fleet
Airbus A321neo	a good 20	220	In service since 2020, moving ever more into the center
Airbus A321LR	on order	178	Longer-range version with its own business cabin

The numbers vary somewhat depending on the source and time because Aegean is constantly taking delivery of new aircraft and giving up older ones. The trend is clear, though: the A321neo is becoming the most important type, and the older A320 and A321 will disappear in the medium term. The manufacturer of all the jets is Airbus.

For the neo family, Aegean chose Pratt & Whitney geared turbofan engines. Fleet overviews at times list several neos as inactive – at many operators of this engine, such downtime is related to inspections. For you as a spotter, that means the actual type distribution in the schedule can differ from the fleet list.

Range is an exciting topic. Aegean has ordered A321LRs, that is A321neos with greater range and their own business cabin. Originally, the airline had also ordered two A321XLRs for flights to India. In 2026, Aegean canceled this order because of delivery delays; the India plans have been postponed as a result, and instead of the XLR, further A321LRs are in the order book.

ceo or neo, A320 or A321? How to sort them

With an all-A320-family fleet, details decide. Two questions help: which fuselage length – and which engine generation?

Important: sharklets alone are not a reliable neo feature, because some of the older Aegean A320s also have sharklets. Rely on the engines. You will find more on type identification in the guide Recognizing aircraft types for beginners and on the type pages for the A320neo and A321neo.

How to recognize Aegean

Aegean has two liveries in circulation. The older livery shows a mostly white fuselage with a thin red line, a gray lower fuselage and the name in dark blue; two seagulls fly in the logo. With the first A320neo at the end of 2019 came the new livery, which Aegean officially presented in February 2020: white and blue, and the two seagulls became a single stylized bird.

Because the older aircraft are leaving the fleet step by step, the old livery is becoming a subject with an expiration date. If you don’t have it in your logbook yet, it is worth keeping a lookout for older A320s.

Special liveries

Two first-generation A320s wear the Star Alliance special livery: SX-DVQ since 2010 and SX-DVR since 2024. In recent years there have also been time-limited special liveries, for example for the Acropolis Museum, the Greek national basketball team, the Olympic team “Team Hellas” and the airline’s 25th anniversary. Such designs eventually disappear again – so it is worth ticking off current special liveries quickly. You will find tips on searching in the article Finding special liveries.

Olympic Air: the turboprop subsidiary

Olympic Air began flight operations in 2009 after investors took over parts of the former state-owned Olympic Airlines. Aegean bought the airline after a lengthy procedure at the European Commission and has run it as a wholly owned subsidiary since 2013. Both brands continue to exist side by side.

In 2026, Olympic Air’s fleet consists of just under 20 turboprops: ATR 72-600s, ATR 42-600s and a few De Havilland Canada Dash 8-100s. With them, Olympic Air flies mainly short routes within Greece, many of them to islands whose runways are too short for jets or whose demand is too small. Some of these routes are publicly subsidized connections. The manufacturer of the ATR models is ATR.

Olympic Air’s logo has six rings, modeled on the logo of the former Olympic Airlines. If you spot in Greece, the Olympic ATRs are mandatory – in central Europe you practically never see them. For clean propeller photos, the guide to shutter speed for propeller aircraft helps.

Other holdings

With Aegean Executive, the group also operates business aircraft, including a Gulfstream G650. Since 2024, Aegean has also held a minority stake in the Spanish airline Volotea; it has given up its stake in the Romanian Animawings again, however.

Spotting Aegean in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Aegean serves a whole series of airports in the German-speaking region. These include Frankfurt, Munich, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Cologne/Bonn, Hannover and Nuremberg, as well as Vienna, Innsbruck, Zurich, Geneva and Basel. Many connections operate mainly in summer, when Greece is in demand as a destination.

At the Star Alliance hubs Frankfurt and Munich, Aegean is most likely to be seen all year round because the cooperation with Lufthansa applies there. In Frankfurt, the Zeppelinheim viewing platform is a good choice, in Munich the visitors’ hill. In Düsseldorf you get a good view from the observation deck, in Vienna from the spotters’ hill and in Zurich from observation deck B.

Compared with German airlines, Aegean is easy to pre-sort: like Lufthansa, Austrian Airlines or Swiss, it belongs to Star Alliance, but unlike them it flies no widebodies. If you see an A320 or A321 in white and blue with an SX- registration, the matter is usually clear.

Before you set off, it is worth checking wind and runway direction in use so that you stand on the right side of the airport. How that works is shown in the guide to the runway direction in use at an airport. For the right light, the article on the sun position at the photo spot helps.

Common mix-ups

• Mistaking A3 for an aircraft type – A3 is Aegean’s IATA code, not a hint of an A300 or A330.
• Mistaking Olympic Air for an independent competitor – it has belonged fully to Aegean since 2013.
• Taking sharklets as a reliable neo feature – some older Aegean A320s have sharklets too. The engines decide.
• Attributing the Star Alliance livery to another airline – with SX-DVQ and SX-DVR, Aegean is flying.
• Confusing the A320 and A321 – the A321 is much longer and has more exits.
• Equating Aegean with long-haul – the airline has no widebodies; it gains range through A321 versions.

Conclusion

At first glance, Aegean Airlines looks uniform: white and blue Airbus jets with SX- registrations. If you look closer, though, you find plenty to collect – old and new livery, A320s and A321s in two generations, two Star Alliance special liveries and, with Olympic Air, a turboprop subsidiary you will almost only catch in Greece. Note the registration and engine generation too, and your Greece sighting becomes a complete logbook entry.