A Lufthansa jet takes off from St. Louis Lambert International Airport, passing over Terminal 1, on a nonstop flight to Frankfurt on Friday, Nov. 29, 2024.
Robert Cohen, Post-Dispatch
Jennifer Backer Special to the Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — German-based Lufthansa Airlines says its nonstop route from St. Louis to Frankfurt has been so successful it would like to expand the flights to five days per week, up from three. But the airline’s expansion plans are on hold as Boeing Co. struggles with a logjam of 787 Dreamliners.
“We’d definitely be expanding the route if we had the aircraft,” said Don Bunkenburg, a senior director of sales for Lufthansa. “It’s really exceeded expectations.”
Airplanes flying the route are currently averaging more than 80% full, Bunkenburg said. The more flights an airline operates to a destination, the greater the cost efficiency, he said.
“We’d never want to just stay with three,” he said.”
Lambert International’s last nonstop flight to Europe was an American Airlines flight to London, which St. Louis lost in 2003 when the airline ended Lambert’s hub role.
Lufthansa expects to receive its first orders of 787 Dreamliners from Boeing in June 2025, and even then, the airline doesn’t expect those planes to begin flying until later in the year, according to Bunkenburg. When Lufthansa begins to receive planes, it will begin looking at route expansion again, he said.
Boeing is producing four 787 Dreamliners per month and plans to return to five per month by year-end, the company said in a statement.
“We continue to work with our customers on the timing of their deliveries while we address shortages of certain components and stabilize our production system,” Boeing said in the same statement. “We regret the impact any schedule changes may have had on our customers, and we remain focused on executing our production plans to meet strong demand for the 787 Dreamliner family.”
Lufthansa currently flies an Airbus 330 on its nonstop route between St. Louis and Frankfurt. While the A330 and the Boeing Dreamliner are similar in passenger capacity, depending on the airline, the Dreamliner has been favored by airlines for its lighter, more fuel-efficient design.
Lufthansa began exploring the St. Louis-to-Frankfurt route at the behest of Bayer executives, who pointed out its executives and employees would generate robust demand for the route between its crop science business here and its global headquarters in Germany.
Lufthansa studied the route and other companies with employees frequently flying to Frankfurt and also factored in leisure travel and quickly came to the conclusion the route would be profitable, Bunkenburg said. Those calculations have proven accurate, and the airline plans to continue its current three-day nonstop route from St. Louis to Frankfurt.
St. Louis-area interests also offered Lufthansa up to $5.7 million in financial incentives to operate the route, with about $700,000 coming directly from the airport. The St. Louis Port Authority offered as much as $2.5 million, and the other half was offered by Greater St. Louis Inc., a regional trade group.
The airline is expected to get less than $5 million as the full incentives, which have ended, were based on a five-day weekly route, according to airport officials.
Lufthansa isn’t alone in dealing with delayed plane orders from Boeing and France-based Airbus, said Panos Kouvelis, the Emerson Distinguished Professor of Supply Chain, Operations, and Technology at Washington University in St. Louis.
Both plane makers rely on thousands of components that are made by big suppliers in Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, Italy and dozens of other countries.
“The global supply chain is their major constraint,” he said. “Both companies haven’t been able to ramp up production like they would like.”
Boeing has also been dealing with quality and regulatory issues going back to at least 2018, Kouvelis said, with two fatal crashes of its 737 aircraft (those aircraft wouldn’t be flying to Frankfurt), regulatory scrutiny and a global supply chain disrupted by the pandemic. That was all compounded by a door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines 737 mid-flight and a recent eight-week machinist strike.
Boeing is working to ramp up production with close Federal Aviation Administration oversight, said Jeff Windau, an industrials analyst with Edward Jones in St. Louis.
“This oversight by the FAA dictates some of their timing,” he said. “They’ve had quality issues from their suppliers come out of the woodwork and bite them.”
While the move to acquiring airplane parts overseas has been a slow, gradual shift since the mid-1990s — and led to booming investment returns — complex global supply chains have left airplane makers vulnerable to quality issues and delayed parts, Kouvelis said.
“Boeing has become less a manufacturing company and more of an assembly and technology company,” he said.
The 2020 global pandemic added to the aviation industry’s problems, Kouvelis said. Airbus and Boeing’s major suppliers lost experienced workers and are now working with new trainees who are not as experienced and are more likely to create quality issues, he said. That’s left both Airbus and Boeing not ready to meet customer demand.
And that’s all compounded by global geopolitical risks, including in Russia and Ukraine. Prior to the war, some of the titanium used to build commercial passenger planes was supplied from Russia, Kouvelis said. Other airplane suppliers also were located in Russia. Tariffs proposed by President-elect Donald Trump pose another potential future risk, he said.
Boeing recently announced layoffs aimed at cutting more than 10% of its workforce.
Windau said recent job cuts at Boeing could also pose an impact, but the company also was staffed for much higher production of its commercial planes. The cuts are likely to have less of an impact than expected, he said.
While turnarounds for Boeing and Airbus won’t be quick, Kouvelis says, strong demand for planes, like from Lufthansa, and air travel bodes well for both companies.
“How many businesses do you know that can have hundreds of planes on backorder and piles of customers that have pre-paid for their orders not even knowing when the planes will arrive?” he said. “The demand is there.”
