Frankfurt / Main » The Lufthansa Group has planned around 360 flights worldwide to bring stranded Germans back home. The travel restrictions of the individual countries to curb the corona pandemic pose major challenges for the airlines, a Lufthansa spokesman said in Frankfurt on Monday. This always includes new regulations on travel: “We are dealing with hourly changes worldwide.”
In addition to the weather and limited flight times, there are also various restrictions on the destination airports that have to be taken into account in the planning. In some cases, Lufthansa airports flew outside of the regular destinations, which required additional planning. It is currently not possible to estimate how many return flights will come after the ones already planned.
“We are working with the Federal Foreign Office to bring as many Germans home as quickly as possible,” said the spokesman. Around 70,000 people from 77 different destinations have already been brought back by Lufthansa aircraft alone.
So far, according to the federal government, a total of more than 200,000 Germans stranded abroad due to the corona crisis. Around 40,000 are still waiting for the return journey, most of them in New Zealand, South Africa and Peru. The federal government’s return campaign was launched in mid-March.
