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.

Little 9 year old Emma Lally from Ireland lost her purse while buying presents before boarding her RyanAir flight home. When Emma (again – a nine year old girl..) asked to get her purse back she was told she had to pay a €10 (about $14) “administrative” fee. This apparently is the fee charged by Greencap which RyanAir uses as its lost property provider.

Now, I have lost items at various places in the past: coffee shops, restaurants and even airports. No one has ever had to audacity to charge for it.

Apparently nothing is sacred anymore in the land of ancillary revenue…

Elitepro-travel has more…

Thomas Cook (Europe’s 2nd largest travel company) is offering a strange new service: reserving a poolside recliner before you even leave home – for a fee…

Caveat: The service will only be available for people booking from Germany.

Apparently, the reasoning is as follows:

Germans are famous around Europe for rising early to reserve recliners near the pool with their towels, and then going back to bed or eating a lengthy breakfast.

The new site is reported to be swamped with requests…

If airlines follow this example, we’ll be reserving space in overhead bins for a fee in the not too distant future..