Lufthansa’s Airbus A340-300 (D-AIGT) “Viersen” celebrated a special milestone: when it operated flight LH405 from New York to Frankfurt on July 7th, it has been collecting important data for climate research in scheduled service for exactly 15 years.
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On July 8th 2011, D-AIGT added a new mission to its passenger flights: for the first time, it also took to the skies in the service of climate research – from Frankfurt to Lagos in Nigeria. At the time, Lufthansa, together with Forschungszentrum Jülich, became the world’s first airline to launch a novel long-term observation of the Earth’s atmosphere via scheduled flights, based on the measurement system of the research program IAGOS.
The Lufthansa Group’s commitment to climate research dates back even further. The IAGOS predecessor system MOZAIC was already installed on two Lufthansa Airbus A340-300s and reliably collected measurement data during cruising flight from 1994 to 2014. This marks over three decades of Lufthansa Group’s support for atmospheric and climate research.
Since then, the Lufthansa Group has continuously expanded its commitment. In February 2015, the second IAGOS system was installed on the Lufthansa Airbus A330-300 with the registration “D-AIKO”, which today flies for Discover Airlines. In November 2022, the “D-AIKE”, another Airbus A330-300 operated by Discover Airlines, became the third IAGOS aircraft in the Group’s fleet. Today, up to 3 Lufthansa Group aircraft collect atmospheric data daily – “Viersen” with Lufthansa, as well as two long-haul aircraft with Discover Airlines, on flight routes around the globe.
