From May 2008, Lufthansa will be operating Airbus A340 services from Düsseldorf to New York, Chicago and Toronto.

The first Lufthansa flight to North America – on 8 June 1955 – was from Dusseldorf to New York. Back then, about 100 passengers could cross the Atlantic in a Super Constellation in some 17 hours.

But what in those days was considered a “high-speed” journey also came at a price. In the 1950s, a ticket for a round-trip Lufthansa flight from Düsseldorf to New York could be purchased for 3,586 D-Marks – which was as much as buying a new VW Beetle!

Today, 53 years later, it only takes about eight hours to get to New York. And Lufthansa customers need no longer pay the equivalent of the price of a new car. For the price of a new Beetle today – about EUR17,000 (Lm7,296) – one could fly across the Atlantic several times.