Lufthansa plans to resume flights to Iraq after 20 years

Deutsche Lufthansa, the flag-carrier airline of Germany, has announced that it plans to operate commercial flights to Iraq from its hubs in Frankfurt and Munich in Germany in the summer of 2010. If and when this happens, Lufthansa will be the first major carrier based in Europe or in the United States to have resumed scheduled flights to Iraq in 20 years.

In a statement, Deutsche Lufthansa said it hopes to operate flights to Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, and also the city of Erbil, in the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, hoping mainly to bank on the increasing demand for such flights from businessmen from Europe, the United States and Iraq.

The airline added that it also expects demand for flights from Iraqi citizens who travel to Europe, the United States and Africa. However, Lufthansa did not give any details about these routes.

A spokesman of Lufthansa said the airline will announce the frequency and other details about the proposed flights to Iraq once the governments of Germany and Iraq finalised a bilateral air-traffic agreement, which the two countries had begun negotiating in October 2009. Both sides, the spokesman added, have emphasided that they wish to re-start the “traditionally friendly” relations in air traffic.

Lufthansa, based in Frankfurt, Germany, had operated flights to Baghdad since 1956, but suspended them, like other airlines based in Europe and the United States did, in 1990 after the start of the so-called first Gulf War, in which the US-led troops liberated Kuwait from the Iraqi occupation.

Lufthansa had then operated two flights a week between Baghdad and Germany, using twin-aisle Airbus SAS A310 aircraft, when it stopped flying on the route in 1990.

After the overthrow of the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein through a United Stats-led invasion in 2003, Iraq has been struggling to exploit its enormous reserves of crude oil and trying to attract foreign investors, even while battling internal strife and domestic terrorism.

With an apparent improvement in the security situation, the government of Iraq is reportedly aspiring to triple the production of crude oil to 7 million barrels a day in the next 6 years.

Iraq, which has the third-largest reserves of crude oil in the world, has already given rights to exploitation of crude oil to a number of international firms, including Royal Dutch Shell Plc, OAO Lukoil, Statoil ASA, and China National Petroleum Corporation.

Lufthansa says it plans to fly to the oil-rich Erbil in northern Iraq. Since 2006, Austrian Airlines has been operating services between Vienna, the capital of Austria, and Erbil except for occasional security-linked stoppage.

Lufthansa – the biggest airline in Germany and the second largest carrier in Europe after the Air France-KLM Group – had bought Austrian Airlines in 2009.

Many airlines already fly to destinations in the Middle East from Baghdad.

Iraqi Airways, the national airline of Iraq, operates regular, scheduled flights to Germany and Sweden.

Iraq is also home to three sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list.