Chair Airlines

Updated: October 2026 – Red tail, white cross – and still not SWISS? If you spot in Zurich, sooner or later you will stumble across Chair Airlines. The small Swiss airline flies with only five aircraft, has an eventful past as Germania Flug and connects Switzerland mainly with the Western Balkans and the holiday destinations around the Mediterranean. Here you will learn how to reliably recognize Chair, which codes to look for on the tracker and where your chances are best.

Chair Airlines at a glance

Chair Airlines is a Swiss leisure airline based in Glattbrugg, right next to Zurich Airport. Zurich is also the home base, and some of the flights also depart from EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse. The business rests on two pillars: scheduled flights to Kosovo and North Macedonia, which make up a large part of the traffic, and holiday flights to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Add to that charter and ad hoc contracts.

Compared with SWISS or Edelweiss, Chair is tiny. In mid-2026 the fleet consisted of five aircraft of the Airbus A320 family. According to a report by AERO INTERNATIONAL, the airline carried around 700,000 passengers in 2023. Chair does not belong to an alliance.

From Germania Flug to Chair: the history

Chair’s story begins in 2014 under a different name. At the time the German leisure airline Germania, together with Swiss investors, founded Germania Flug AG in Glattbrugg. Germania held a minority stake and also lent the Swiss subsidiary its brand look. Flight operations began in March 2015 – initially for the tour operator Hotelplan under the brand HolidayJet, with two Airbus A319s and one A321. At the end of 2015 the cooperation with HolidayJet ended, after which the company flew under its own name.

The turning point came in early 2019 with the insolvency of the German Germania. The Swiss company was not directly affected and kept flying. The Germania shares were taken over by Albex Aviation, the holding company of Air Prishtina boss Leyla Ibrahimi-Salahi. Shortly afterward the Polish charter airline Enter Air came in with just under half of the shares. In June 2019 the new name followed: Chair Airlines.

For spotters this backstory is more than trivia: the A319 HB-JOH, for example, had flown for Hamburg International, Germania and Germania Flug before Chair. If you sort old photos, you may therefore find the same aircraft in several different liveries.

Codes and callsign

• IATA code CS: appears in the flight number, that is on ticket, boarding pass and departure board.
• ICAO code CSW: appears in the air traffic control flight plan and on flight trackers.
• Callsign EIGER: this is how the crew calls in on the radio – like the mountain in the Bernese Oberland.

The callsign is a nice example of how the radio name and the airline name don’t have to match. If you hear “EIGER” on the scanner, you first have to know that Chair is meant. Why flight number, ICAO code and callsign often diverge is explained in the articles on IATA and ICAO codes and on the difference between callsign and flight number.

The fleet: small and all Airbus

Chair relies entirely on the A320 family from Airbus. In mid-2026 the fleet looked like this:

Type	Number	Seats	Spotter tip
Airbus A320	4	180	The backbone of the fleet, first generation (ceo)
Airbus A319	1	150	The last short model in the fleet

The direction has been clear for years: away from the A319, toward the A320. A mishap got it started. In 2020 the A319 with the registration HB-JOH was damaged during maintenance in Naples when it collided with a hangar door. The tail was so badly affected that a repair was no longer worthwhile. Piquant for photo collectors: HB-JOH was the first aircraft to wear the new Chair livery in 2019.

As a replacement, the first A320 with the registration HB-JOK arrived at the end of 2021. In 2022 two more A320s followed, one of them as a replacement for another A319. With a fourth A320 the fleet grew to five aircraft by 2026. With 180 seats, the A320 at Chair offers 30 seats more than the A319.

An A321 belonged to the fleet only in the early period as Germania Flug. Chair has no open orders for brand-new aircraft. The fleet numbers are therefore a snapshot – at such a small airline, even a single addition or departure changes the picture noticeably.

A320 or A319? How to tell them apart

At Chair a close look is worthwhile because only a single A319 is still flying. Both types wear the same livery – the difference lies in the length.

The most reliable are the emergency exits over the wing: on a side-on photo you count them in seconds. If you are still unsure about the A320 family in general, the article Recognizing aircraft types for beginners will help.

How to recognize Chair – and the mix-up with SWISS

The name was developed by the Zurich agency Branders. On the fuselage it appears in lowercase letters: “chair,” with “Ch” in red and “air” in blue – red for Switzerland, blue for the warm-water destinations. Add to that the red tail with a white Swiss cross and a stylized wave on the rear fuselage.

Exactly here lies the trap: SWISS also wears a red tail with a white cross. On approach from below or from a great distance, the two look confusingly alike – especially since SWISS also operates A320s and A319s in Zurich. The difference is in the detail.

The registration helps too: Chair aircraft are registered in Switzerland and carry an HB-, several of them in the series HB-JO.., such as HB-JOK. Since SWISS also flies with HB-, the prefix alone is not enough – the complete registration, however, is unambiguous. How registrations are built is explained in the article Understanding aircraft registrations.

The route network

The core of the network is connections to Kosovo and North Macedonia. Chair serves Pristina several times a day in summer from Zurich and also from Basel, plus Skopje and Ohrid. These routes carry a large part of the traffic, especially in the holiday periods, when many people with roots in the region visit their families.

Besides that, Chair flies to classic holiday destinations: Mallorca, Crete, Kos, Rhodes, Cyprus as well as Hurghada and Marsa Alam in Egypt. For summer 2026, further destinations were added, including Patras, Tirana, Tuzla, Porto and Marrakech. The announced route to Vlora in Albania, on the other hand, was dropped because the opening of the airport there was delayed.

In the winter schedule 2026/27 Chair adds extra flights over Christmas and New Year, including to Porto and Tuzla – also from Basel-Mulhouse to Porto. That shows how strongly the network fluctuates with the seasons. For your planning that means: don’t rely on last year’s schedule.

Besides its own network, Chair takes on charter and wet lease contracts. In 2023, for example, Chair flew for Marabu Airlines. Such operations are hard to predict but occasionally produce Chair sightings at airports where the airline otherwise doesn’t show up.

Spotting Chair Airlines

The best address is clearly Zurich. The fleet is at home here, and in the morning the aircraft take off for their first rotations. Good legal locations at the airport are Observation deck B and the hill Butzenbüel. From the deck you also see the aircraft on the ground and can read registrations at leisure; at Butzenbüel you get nice side views depending on the runway direction in use.

In Zurich Chair shares the stage with SWISS, Edelweiss, Helvetic Airways and many foreign airlines. That is exactly why a targeted look at the tracker is worthwhile: with only five aircraft there is a manageable number of movements per day. Which runway is currently used for takeoffs and landings decides your location – more in the guide to runway direction at airports.

At EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse Chair is represented mainly with flights to Pristina; in winter an A320 was temporarily stationed there. There you often meet Chair alongside easyJet Switzerland, which has a big base in Basel.

In Germany Chair is a rare sight. At times the airline flew rotations that led via Stuttgart or Düsseldorf, and individual charter flights. Fixed routes to Germany are not part of the core network. If a CSW flight shows up on the tracker at your home airport, it is a real opportunity.

Common mix-ups

• Taking Chair for SWISS – both have a red tail with a white cross. Titles, wave on the rear fuselage and ICAO code (CSW instead of SWR) decide.
• Searching the tracker for CS – trackers mostly show the ICAO code, so CSW for Chair, not the CS flight number.
• Not placing “EIGER” on the radio – the callsign belongs to Chair Airlines.
• Equating Germania Flug and Germania – Germania Flug was the Swiss company that became Chair; the German Germania went insolvent in 2019.
• Logging the A319 as an A320 – count the emergency exits over the wing.
• Dismissing an Enter Air 737 as a false sighting – with a CS flight number it may well be flying on behalf of Chair.

Conclusion

Chair Airlines is small but an appealing target for spotters in Switzerland. The airline has an eventful past as Germania Flug, flies a manageable Airbus fleet and looks confusingly like SWISS on the tail. If you follow the ICAO code CSW on the tracker, watch for the titles and wave on the fuselage and note the registration, you will have the complete fleet in your logbook faster than with almost any other airline.