The airline Eurowings celebrates its 1th anniversary on February 2023st, 30. The carrier emerged on February 1, 1993 from the merger of NFD, founded by Hans Rudolf Wöhrl, and RFG, founded by Reinhard Santer received. The logo introduced during the founding of the company was designed by students at the Nuremberg Art Academy.

The airline started out with almost 1.000 employees and ATR 72 turboprop aircraft. Although 32 destinations in eleven countries were flown to in the year it was founded, the focus was on connections within Germany. For a long time, Eurowings still had to fly under the flight numbers of NFD and RFG, because the code required by Eurowings had been assigned by the international aviation organization IATA to a subsidiary of "Janlyn PTE" based in Papua New Guinea. Through intensive negotiations, it was finally possible to obtain the EW code for their own flights. The first flight, numbered EW733, was from Nuremberg to Paris in 1994. In the 90s, Eurowings took over feeder flights for the Dutch company KLM, among other things, and was temporarily flying 13 aircraft to Amsterdam – initially as a competitor to Lufthansa.

The year 2001 marks a milestone in Eurowings history. The corporate strategy changes with the participation of the Lufthansa Group: The turboprop aircraft are replaced by CRJ jet jets and Eurowings operates flights in the Lufthansa Regional group. Just one year later, Eurowings launched Germanwings, a low-cost pioneer for Germany, which, in tandem with Eurowings, soon cracked the 10 million passenger mark.

The low-cost business was entered under the Germanwings brand. For this purpose, the existing subsidiary Eurowings Flug GmbH, on whose AOC the Airbus jets were registered, was renamed. The concept quickly became the industry standard and is still used at Eurowings to this day. In 2011, Eurowings moved to the largest air traffic location in North Rhine-Westphalia – to Düsseldorf.

“Light Sky Blue” and “Burgundy”: the Eurowings key colors since 2014

In 2014, the company got the look and branding that is familiar today with the key colors “Light Sky Blue” and “Burgundy”. The new strategy includes, among other things, that Germanwings and Eurowings will be significantly expanded in response to growing travel: The previous Eurowings fleet of smaller CRJ aircraft will be replaced by 23 aircraft from the Airbus A320 family.

The accident of Germanwings flight 4U9525 on March 24, 2015, which cost the lives of 150 people, is also inextricably linked to the company's history. An event that will forever remain in the collective memory.

As a result, Eurowings begins to expand away from German airports, soon opening a base on Mallorca and establishing Eurowings Europe flight operations for pan-European routes outside of Germany. And the dynamic development continues: after Air Berlin went out of business in 2017 and the majority of the fleet was taken over, hundreds of new jobs were created - many of them filled by former AirBerlin colleagues.

“There are only very few airlines in Germany that have asserted themselves in a difficult market environment for 30 years and have repeatedly mastered dynamic changes. It's all the nicer that we can celebrate our 30th birthday as Germany's largest leisure airline," says Eurowings CEO Jens Bischof. “We owe our success first and foremost to our more than 4.000 employees from 60 nations, who have found their professional home with us. This diversity makes us strong. Because what has always distinguished Eurowings is the very special team spirit and the ability to react quickly to new market changes. We say thank you, Team Eurowings - here's to the next 30 years!"

The Eurowings fleet includes more than 100 aircraft, with more than 140 destinations in over 50 countries on the flight schedule. In addition to its bases in Cologne/Bonn, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin, Eurowings also has important locations in Palma de Mallorca, Salzburg, Prague and Stockholm. This makes the Lufthansa subsidiary one of the largest holiday airlines in Europe.