History
LTU was established in May 1955 as Lufttransport Union and started operations in Frankfurt. It adopted its present name in 1956 when it operated charter flights. LTU has been headquartered in Düsseldorf since 1961.
LTU ran very popular U.S. routes from its Düsseldorf hub and directly competed on some of them with Lufthansa, Germany's flag carrier. LTU did run well frequented services from Düsseldorf to Beijing, Chengdu and Shanghai but they were dropped.
The airline was owned (at March 2007) by Intro Verwaltungsgesellschaft (55%) and Marbach Beteiligung und Consulting (45%) and was had previously 2,892 employees before merged.
In March 2007, Air Berlin took over LTU International, creating the fourth largest airline group in Europe in terms of traffic. Between them, the airlines carried 22.1 million passengers in 2006. The takeover was driven by the prospect of branching into long-haul operations and the chance to establish a stronger presence at Düsseldorf International Airport. LTU will retain its name on its leisure routes but routes to the U.S. and China will be branded by Air Berlin.
On 1 May 2007, LTU operated the first Arctic & North Pole Sightseeing Flight from continental Europe in aviation history for their charter customer Deutsche Polarflug. The flight took 12h55m and the aircraft, an A330-200 took a group of 283 passengers from Düsseldorf via Norway, Svalbard, The North Pole, Eastern Greenland and Iceland back to Düsseldorf.
LTU opened a third long-haul base (to add to Düsseldorf and Munich) at Berlin-Tegel International Airport in October 2007 when it based a single Airbus A330-200 there to launch flights to Bangkok, Punta Cana and Varadero.
Air Berlin announced in 2008 that the trademark LTU will no longer be used. All flights are now named Air Berlin.
Read more about this topic: LTU International
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