Hapag-Lloyd Flug

Foundation and early years

Hapag-Lloyd Flug was established in June 1972, two years after HAPAG merged with Norddeutscher Lloyd, when the Hapag-Lloyd shipping group bought a few Boeing 727s to fly its cruise passengers from Germany to the ports of call for the cruises. It began operations on 30 March 1973. With the boom of the holiday charter flight market in the 1970s, it quickly adopted charter flights to popular holiday destinations in the Mediterranean basin area and the Canary Islands as well and soon became one of the biggest German charter airlines. Throughout the years, the airline added regular passenger flights to its schedule, as well as new airplanes, such as the Boeing 737-100, Airbus A300B4 and Airbus A310 aircraft. In 1977, Bavaria Germanair, a charter air carrier operating Airbus A300B4 and BAC One-Eleven series 400 and 500 jetliners, was merged into Hapag-Lloyd Flug.

In 1998, it became the first airline in the world to adopt the Boeing 737-800.

New ownership and brand

Since 1997, it had been a subsidiary of TUI AG, which also includes the Hapag-Lloyd cargo container line and cruise line. When TUI released their new "big smile" logo in 2002, the Hapag-Lloyd livery that had remained unchanged for almost 30 years was completely changed to a new, light blue, white and red scheme with the new TUI logo on the tail to represent TUI's new corporate design. The year 2002 also saw the founding of Hapag-Lloyd Express, a low-cost airline that was to compete with the likes of Ryanair.

In 2005, the airline changed its brand to Hapagfly due to the new marketing strategy of the TUI Group since the sale of the airline from Hapag Lloyd to the leisure group. In January 2007 in a restructuring, it combined its operations with Hapag-Lloyd Express to become TUIfly, for which it operated all flights, while Hapag-Lloyd Express marketed them until TUIfly got its own license.

Destinations

Hapag-Lloyd operated services from many airports in Germany mainly to European holiday resorts in the Mediterranean basin and in the Canary Islands.

Fleet

Over the course of the years, Hapag-Lloyd Flug operated the following aircraft types, primarily through aircraft leasing from companies such as ILFC and GECAS.

Incidents and accidents

On 12 July 2000, Hapag-Lloyd Flight 3378, an Airbus A310 flying from Chania to Hanover, suffered fuel exhaustion caused in part by the crew's decision to continue the flight despite faulty landing gear that had partially retracted, which resulted in an emergency crash landing at Vienna Airport. The aircraft was written off, and 26 people were injured. Although it was the first (and remained the only) incident in Hapag-Lloyd's history in which an aircraft was damaged and people were injured, it caused much criticism in the media. In 2004, a Hanover district court convicted Captain Wolfgang Arminger of "dangerous interference into air traffic," saying he was "endangering others' lives" mainly by failing to divert to Zagreb, and sentenced him with a six-month suspended prison sentence.