Over the last decades, many airlines have gone under. But rarely has one ever been shut down because the federal entity governing it went away. Such was the case with Interflug (formerly Lufthansa East), the East German state-owned airline, which was shut down when East and West Germany unified 19 years ago.
In a case like this, what happens to the planes and the airline personnel? The German magazine “Der Spiegel” has an interesting piece on the demise of Interflug. In the case of pilots and other personnel, they got either transferred to Lufthansa or found new jobs, some of them as far away as in Taiwan.
The situation was different with regards to aircraft. The German government only kept the 3 new Airbus planes that Interflug had. All of the older aircraft, mainly Tupolevs and Ilyushins, were either sold or scrapped. A number of IL-62’s, IL-18’s and TU-134’s are still in use in Russia, Asia, Africa and Australia. Some of the scrapped aircraft are used for training purposes, mainly by local firefighters that are stationed at various airports in the eastern part of Germany. Others are in aircraft museums and one IL-14P (pictured above), which was converted into a restaurant, is now parked next to a car dealership in Cämmerswalde.
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