Now that Lufthansa Cargo is welcoming its brand new Boeing 777F fleet come join me for a cockpit ride on their lovely MD-11F tri-jet! The friendly crew is letting us have a deep look inside the cockpit during all phases of the flight which gives you a lovely impression of their day-to-day business.\r
\r
Lufthansa Cargo AG is a German cargo airline and a wholly owned subsidiary of Lufthansa. It operates worldwide air freight and logistics services and is headquartered at Frankfurt Airport, the main hub of Lufthansa.\r
Lufthansa Cargo does not only operate dedicated cargo freighters, but also has access to the cargo capacities of more than 300 passenger aircraft of the Lufthansa Group.\r
As of new, all Lufthansa Cargo aircraft are based at Frankfurt Airport, the seventh busiest freight hub in the world, where the airline enjoys a strong co-operation with Fraport, the operator of the airport. Cargo facilities at the airport are divided into two places (Cargo City North and South), of which the first one is nearly exclusively used by Lufthansa Cargo.\r
In earlier years, Lufthansa Cargo had a secondary base at Leipzig/Halle Airport, the European hub for DHL Express, from where it operated flights on behalf of DHL. Activities at this airport gradually came to an end following the formation of AeroLogic as a joint venture between Lufthansa and DHL, which henceforth caters for the DHL flights, allowing Lufthansa Cargo to concentrate on other services.\r
In 2000, Lufthansa Cargo was a founding member of the WOW Alliance, a global cargo airline alliance, but left in 2007 as it did not see any benefits for the future.\r
Lufthansa Cargo used to operate a hub for intra-Asian flights at Astana International Airport in Kazakhstan, but was forced to relocate it to Yemelyanovo Airport in Russia in 2007, because otherwise the airline would have been banned from entering Russian airspace, in what was described as anof economic blackmailing by the Russian authorities.\r
In 2008, Jade Cargo International founded as a joint venture between Shenzhen Airlines, Lufthansa Cargo, and the German Investment Corporation, a German governmental entity, thus allowing Lufthansa Cargo for a stronger presence in the Asian markets.\r
In May new, Lufthansa Cargo opened another hub at Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad, in order to transport temperature-sensitive goods, especially pharmaceuticals, between South East Asia and Europe (and onwards to the United States).\r
\r
MD-11F (53 built): the Freight transport aircraft was the second variant on offer at launch in 1986 and was the last and longest (1988–2000) manufured version. The all-cargo aircraft features the same forward port side cargo door (140 by 102 inches (3.6 m × 2.6 m)) as the MD-11CF, a main deck volume of 15,530 cubic feet (440 m3), a maximum payload of 200,151 pounds (90,787 kg) and can transport 26 pallets of the same dimensions (88 by 125 inches (2.2 m × 3.2 m) or 96 by 125 inches (2.4 m × 3.2 m)) as for the MD-11C and MD-11CF. The MD-11F was delivered between 1991 and 2001 to FedEx Express (22), Lufthansa Cargo (14), and other airlines with fewer aircraft.
