Air Berlin

1 · POSITION

Air Berlin’s long-haul premium cabin held nineteen seats. German trade press reported in March 2013 that they lowered completely level into a sleeping surface about 1.85 metres long, and that they offered, among other things, a massage function. The first Airbus A330 fitted with the cabin had entered service shortly before. The airline presented it in Berlin while saying it wanted better service on board and at the airports. [1]

2 · THE CABIN WAS REBUILT BEFORE IT WAS REBUILT AGAIN

The work began a year earlier. In January 2012 the trade press reported that the airline had started upgrading its long-haul cabins, so that after conversion every A330-200 would have a new Business Class, with new seats in Economy as well and a new entertainment system installed in both classes. All twelve long-haul aircraft were to be converted by the start of the summer 2012 schedule. The all-Economy A330-300s were left out. [3]

3 · A SHAREHOLDER SET THE STANDARD

The second rebuild was reported as not wholly the airline’s own decision. In January 2013 the trade press wrote that seats from the manufacturer Sogerma, lowering to a bed flat through 180 degrees and carrying a massage function, were going into the A330 long-haul fleet, apparently under pressure from the majority shareholder Etihad. The business class introduced about a year before was said not to have met that shareholder’s standard. [2]

4 · THE AIRPORT COMPANY KEEPS THE CLOSING DATE

Berlin’s airport company records the ending in its Tegel history. It notes that in 2010 Air Berlin continued to build Tegel into its hub, and that on 27 October airberlin, until then the largest airline in Berlin, stopped flight operations. The same entry adds that the insolvency affected passenger numbers only slightly, with just under 20.5 million passengers flying to and from Tegel that year. The cabin ended with the airline. [4]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ Nothing fetched here supports the register’s 1978 founding. The trade reports are truncated behind a registration wall, so the lounges named in one of their headlines could not be located or described, and no fetched page establishes who catered the cabin. The nineteen seats and the 1.85 metres are one report’s figures for the A330 and must not be read across the fleet. That Etihad forced the change is the trade press’s reading, not a statement by either airline. [1–4]