Air Berlin will be leasing three Germania Fokker 100 jets from March onwards for the City Shuttle routes. The aircraft will fly in Air Berlin livery. Germania pilots will be in the cockpit, while Air Berlin’s cabin staff will be looking after the passengers on board. Since Germania-Express (gexx) will be discontinuing its flights from Hamburg, Berlin and Düsseldorf to Zurich and Vienna, passengers will be able to transfer to Air Berlin. From 29th March this will also include the Munich-Vienna route, where Germania-Express has been operating two flights a day, and which has not been one of the Air Berlin routes in the past.
It seems that Fokker 100s are popular right now because two major operators have withdrawn their massive fleets of this type, i.e. American Airlines and US Airways.
The reason behind the increased popularity of the 100 is certainly not its design itself, but its bargain price right now. And twin-engined Fokkers are certainly cheaper to operate than four-engines Avros. Air Berlin are getting rid of all Avros when the lease-contracts expire at the end of March 2004.
sab319 wrote:I find it very strange for Air Berlin to take 3 new F100's, wouldn't it have been more logically to lease another 3 Bae 146-300?
Isn't Air Berlin a LCC? Wouldn't it then be more logical to just lease a couple more B737's?
Or are they going the JetBlue way? Do they want a type for the regional routes?
I really like the Fokker aircrafts, it's nice to see a few European carriers will add them to their fleets. But if the launch of the "new" Fokker production will start, will the planes carry the name Fokker ? or Rekkof ?
As far as I know the type will still be the Fokker 100, only the company had to be Rekkof since the company rights from Fokker are ofcourse in Fokker/Stork. Since Fokker/Stork is also involved in the plans from Rekkof you don't have to worry about that, if they restart the Fokker will be back....YESSSSSSSSS
p.s. I was talking with a chief pilot last week from a Dash 8 and hey told me:" Do you know what it is, the Dash doesn't have the quality of a Fokker 50". I was totally surprised but also happy to hear it from a chief pilot what kind of quality aircrafts the Fokkers are and I am proud that I can tell I did work for Fokker in the old times
there is a brand new special fokker maintance at amsterdam, a holding between KLM and Stork ( Fokker )
and there is a possibility that the production of the F70 and F100 will be re-open via Rekoff
But they told me they are not realy cheap to buy..... it seems that they are expensive in the seccond hand market...
And they are much faster then the avro; avro ==> M0.70
==> F70/F100 M0.77/0.78
Just to let everybody know... It's now a year later from when this post was placed.
Stork and K.L.M. uk's cooperation was of very short duration... and klm decided to go on and buy hanger 73 (an old fokker hanger) and stork kept the old hanger 9 (old connie hanger).
Cityhopper however has discontinued the maintenance contract with klm uk engineering and had asked martinair to go ahead and do it.
I hope martinair will take many people on to take the new contract and that the fokker 100/70 maintenance on schiphol airport remains intact.
Last edited by caunimade on 02 Mar 2005, 02:18, edited 1 time in total.