Lufthansa almost women only crew on International Women’s Day, operated five of the Lufthansa Group’s long-haul flights to New York from Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Vienna and Brussels.
Today, March 8th, five flights of the Lufthansa Group with 63 female and one male crew member will depart Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Vienna and Brussels for New York.
Lufthansa, Swiss and Brussels Airlines flights will have women-only crews, while on Austrian Airlines flight OS087, all but one crew member will be female.
Although Austrian Airlines employs female captains, there is none currently flying the Boeing 767 deployed on the route to New York.
A member of the Executive Board, Chief Officer of Corporate Human Resources and Legal Affairs of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Dr. Bettina Volkens, said, “We hope that, in the future, more young women will take an interest in careers that up until recently have been considered a male domain”.
Even though the number of male pilots dominates the industry, women in the cockpit are no longer considered unusual.
Women have been flying scheduled service with Lufthansa since 1988 and 2010 saw a debut in the worldwide air cargo sector when a Lufthansa cargo aircraft took off with a women-only crew.
Today, approximately six per cent of pilots in the Lufthansa Group are women and that figure has been rising steadily in recent years.
To reflect the increase, Lufthansa had the term “capitaine”, which translates to “women pilots”, approved by the German Language Society while about 80 per cent of the cabin crew employees are women.
Increasing the proportion of women in management is also an objective of the Lufthansa Group.
“We were able to attain tangible results by taking concrete measures such as the introduction of a transparent job posting process and the implementation of diversity criteria in hiring procedures,” states Volkens.
Together with other major German companies, in 2011, Lufthansa voluntarily established target quotas in order to increase the proportion of women in management.
By 2020, this should increase by 30 per cent in relation to 2010.
Lufthansa Flights take off from Frankfurt and Munich
At 10:50 in Frankfurt Flight LH400, a Boeing 747-8, will take off with 16 female crew members in the cabin and three female pilots. LH410, an Airbus A330-300, will take off 55 minutes later from Munich with two women in the cockpit and 11 amongst the cabin crew. The five Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines and Brussels Airlines flights will land at Kennedy Airport in New York between 1:20 p.m. and 3:50 p.m. local time.
