The German regional airport Erfurt-Weimar had an unusual guest for this airport on Friday morning: Wamos Air landed at 9:30 am with an A330 “Preighter”.

Wide-body aircraft are rather the exception at the small airport in Thuringia. On behalf of the shipping company Röhling, Wamos Air and EC-MTU, which was converted into a "makeshift freighter" a few months ago by removing the seats, brought around two million FFP2 masks from Guangzhou / China to Erfurt. It took around two hours for the airport employees to unload and then refuel the airbus. Then the “Preighter” flew back to its home base in Madrid.

"With this important cargo flight with a wide-body aircraft, Erfurt-Weimar Airport is once again proving its important infrastructure function for the Free State of Thuringia," explains Airport Manager Gerd Stöwer, who also points out that FedEx / TNT carry out cargo flights at this airport almost every day with smaller equipment. The importance of Erfurt-Weimar in the area of ​​maintenance is also increasing.

The Airbus A330-200 used with the registration EC-MTU has a “German past” because the twin-jet engine was delivered to LTU brand new in 2002. After the takeover and integration, what was then D-ALPE was in the service of Air Berlin. The A330 was officially returned to lessor AerCap in December 2017. Since April 2018, Wamos Air has been the new lessee of the almost 19-year-old wide-body jet, which is currently acting as a “preighter”.

"We already had good experience with the Erfurt airport in the spring of last year in the handling of urgently needed and time-critical freight and have therefore decided in favor of this airport again", says Daniel Brix, Operations Manager at the Röhling forwarding company.