Air traffic: Why aviation history is being written in Paderborn

Paderborn/Lippstadt Airport is a small regional airport in North Rhine-Westphalia, typically inconspicuous and unknown. In its 55-year history, it has never been in the spotlight. That's about to change, as on September 1st, a maiden flight will take off from the Westphalian province. The virtual airline Skyhub Pad will begin operations.

The region has Lufthansa to thank for the new airline's existence: Last year, the airline announced it would discontinue daily direct flights from Paderborn/Lippstadt Airport to Munich starting in May 2025. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr explained the move by arguing that the connection was no longer profitable for his company.

A comprehensible reasoning from Lufthansa's perspective, but for the local economy, with its numerous strong medium-sized companies, the decision posed a serious threat: They need air connections to quickly reach Munich and from there to the rest of the world. No air connection means fewer business meetings and no more meetings that can be completed with a one-day arrival and departure, as the region is also largely cut off from Deutsche Bahn's long-distance network.

"The ICE network essentially bypasses Paderborn. We do have a direct connection, but it only runs once a day," reports airport spokesperson Matthias Hack, who also serves as spokesperson for the new airline. Furthermore, the direct ICE train doesn't depart Paderborn until 11 a.m. "It's never possible to get there and back in one day and also have business meetings," Hack explains in the ntv podcast "Wieder was lernen" (Learned Something Again) .

The train journey from Paderborn to Munich Airport takes about five hours, and from Frankfurt to Munich Airport takes a good three and a half hours. The flight connection to Munich is unbeatable in terms of time. The flight time from Paderborn to the Bavarian capital is one hour and 25 minutes.

If the Lufthansa connection had been canceled without replacement, Paderborn/Lippstadt would have become a purely tourist airport. Local business owners wanted to prevent that. "Last fall, Lufthansa informed us of their plans," Hack reports in the podcast. "Then we had two options. We could say: Okay, then that's Lufthansa's decision, we can't change it. Or we could take fate into our own hands and do it ourselves."

The entrepreneurs received prominent support from Carsten Linnemann. The CDU General Secretary is the Bundestag member for the Paderborn constituency. He called on Christoph Plass. Plass is head of the consulting firm Unity AG and also vice president of the Bielefeld Chamber of Industry and Commerce. According to him, Linnemann suggested that businesses should prevent the region from being left behind. This is how Plass recalled it almost a year later in an interview with "Die Zeit." The result was Skyhub Pad – an airline that doesn't even own its own aircraft.

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The concept is as follows: The new airline leases an aircraft from the Danish airline DAT, plus crew, maintenance, and insurance. If the leased turboprop aircraft breaks down, DAT provides a replacement aircraft. This all-in-one package transforms Skyhub Pad into a so-called virtual airline. The new airline bears the financial risk alone.

Entrepreneurs from the region contributed the seed capital for the venture. There are now 59 managing directors involved, each contributing €25,000.

But the undertaking is complicated. If the airline is to be financially viable, i.e., break even, it needs 90,000 passengers per year to fly between Paderborn and Munich. This is stated in Skyhub Pad's business plan. Lufthansa counted 104,000 passengers on the route last year. Therefore, there is little room for error. And even more than 100,000 travelers were not enough for Germany's largest airline to continue operating the route.

How does Skyhub Pad plan to secure its operations? The aircraft, a modern 70-seat turboprop, is smaller, lighter, and therefore more efficient than the aircraft used by Lufthansa. "We expect this aircraft to be very well booked in the medium to long term," says spokesperson Hack. "Past experience has shown that there is demand here in the region."

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Passengers can fly for €149 one way – the first week costs a one-time fee of €89. While this pricing model generally doesn't compare to the saver fares offered by Deutsche Bahn, anyone booking at relatively short notice will pay a significantly higher, often three-digit, price for the train journey anyway.

Could Skyhub Pad even be pioneering work for economically ailing regional airports in Germany? Kassel-Calden, Erfurt-Weimar, Rostock-Laage, Frankfurt-Hahn, and several others – the list is long. In Paderborn/Lippstadt, Heinz Nixdorf Airport could one day offer additional short-haul connections. "If demand from both the business and private sectors is high enough, we can certainly imagine targeting other destinations," says Hack. "But for now, the priority is to make this proven route between Paderborn and Munich successful."

The entrepreneurs behind Skyhub Pad are aware that a domestic flight connection within Germany will also attract criticism. Environmentalists have been vehemently calling for the abolition of short-haul flights for years. "Our turboprop aircraft has the great advantage of being very environmentally friendly because it consumes significantly less kerosene than a conventional jet," Hack counters.

In 2020, the BUND (German Unity Foundation) even published a study calling for the complete closure of Paderborn/Lippstadt and six other regional airports. The reaction to Lufthansa's flight ban demonstrates that there would be strong resistance in Westphalia to an airport closure.

This article originally appeared on ntv.de. The news portal, like Capital, is part of RTL Deutschland.