Flight to Iraq

Lufthansa is now going to become the first major European carrier in 20 years to launch services to Baghdad. The German carrier says that it is planning to flight to the Iraqi capital and Erbil in the north from Frankfurt and Munich come this summer. Adding these new services was said to be brought on due to high demand.A spokesman at Lufthansa, Boris Ogursky, said that the demand goes in both directions right now. He confirmed that a start date for this new service should be around mid 2010. However, he noted that it is still way too soon to actually give an official launch date.

Lufthansa first started flight to Baghdad back in 1956. However, the carrier had to stop their operations there in 1990 because of the Gulf War, when United States led forces reversed Iraq’s invasion on Kuwait. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq has struggled to exploit vast crude oil reserves due to civil war.However, now that security is finally improving, the Iraqi government now hopes to triple oil output from 2.4 million barrels a day to 7 million over he next six years. Lufthansa’s application for the routes is being considered under terms of an initial aviation agreement reached with Iraq’s government in October.

Meanwhile, German low cost carrier, Air Berlin, has published an online flight schedule to both Erbil and Sulimaniyah from four German cities in anticipation of starting services as early as next month. The carrier is entering the market because of interest from an Iraq base charter customer, according to a spokeswoman for Air Berlin.