Established in 1997 as Eurowings Flug GmbH, the airline has been known as Germanwings since 2002. It has been wholly owned by Lufthansa since January 1, 2009 and is part of Star Alliance.
As part of the Lufthansa Group, the carrier offers its customers the quality of service the parent company is famed for, some additional Lufthansa services, combined with cheap fares. From fall 2007, Germanwings became the first German budget airline to offer the Smart Connect special program for flying with transfers, and began supporting the Lufthansa Miles & More bonus program in 2009.
The airline serves more than 110 European destinations and makes regular flights to North Africa and Israel. In the CIS, the carrier only flies to St. Petersburg and Moscow.
As of January 2015, Germanwings' fleet included 81 aircraft with an average age of 9.2 years, 42 of them 150-seat Airbus A319-100 airliners — the most popular brand. The airline also has 16 Airbus A320-300s, which can carry up to 174 passengers, and 23 Bombardier CRJ900s with capacity for up to 90 seats. Almost all the airliners it uses have come from Lufthansa and Eurowings.
In 2010, a Germanwings airliner narrowly escaped a crash. The incident occurred during a flight from Vienna to Cologne Bonn on December 19. During descent and preparation for landing, both pilots suddenly became ill because of a very strong odor in the cockpit. The pilots reported a sharp tingling sensation in their hands and feet, poor vision and severe dizziness.
However, the pilots managed to land the Airbus with 149 passengers onboard safely. In fact the passengers were never even informed of the problem. An investigation revealed that the pilots had inhaled toxic fumes that had come from the engine through faulty seals.
