On March 8th, five flights of the Lufthansa Group with 63 female and one male crew member departed Frankfurt, Munich, Geneva, Vienna, and Brussels for New York. Lufthansa, SWISS, and Brussels Airlines flights had women-only crews, while on Austrian Airlines flight OS087, all but one crew member was female. Although Austrian Airlines employs female captains, there currently is none flying the Boeing 767 deployed on the route to New York.
"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," says Dr. Bettina Volkens, Member of the Executive Board, Chief Officer of Corporate Human Resources and Legal Affairs of Deutsche Lufthansa AG.
Even though the number of male pilots dominates the industry, women in the cockpit is no longer considered unusual. Women have been flying scheduled service with Lufthansa since 1988. 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 percent 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. In cabin crews, around 80 percent of 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 percent in relation to 2010.
Lufthansa Flights took off from Frankfurt and Munich
At 10:50 in Frankfurt Flight LH400, a Boeing 747-8, took off with 16 female crew members in the cabin and three female pilots. LH410, an Airbus A330-300, took 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 landed at Kennedy Airport in New York between 1:20 p.m. and 3:50 p.m. local time.