At least on the ground, Lufthansa wants to be completely CO2030-neutral by 2. According to its own information, the Group has been purchasing exclusively green electricity in its home market since 2020. Lufthansa's ground service provider LEOS has recently put two fully electric tugs for aircraft into operation in Frankfurt. The two vehicles are much more powerful than previous purely electric towing vehicles. According to the manufacturer Goldhofer, the Phoenix E aircraft tractors are able to tow aircraft up to a take-off weight of 350 tons over short and long distances between parking areas, maintenance hangars and departure positions.

Jochen Remmert

Airport editor and correspondent Rhein-Main-Süd.

  • Follow I follow

The good news is that the Phoenix electric tugs are powerful enough for the new twin-engine long-haul aircraft that Lufthansa will rely on in the future, and both the Airbus A 350-9 and the Boeing 787-9, the Dreamliner, with their maximum take-off weights of 268 and 252 tonnes, are well within the range that the new electric tugs can handle. The bad news: The performance is not enough for a Boeing 747-8, which has a maximum take-off weight of 442 tonnes, nor for Lufthansa's reactivated Airbus A 380, which even weighs in at a maximum take-off weight of 560 tonnes.

Only climate-neutral electricity

With a capacity of 165 kilowatt hours and a drive power of 240 kilowatts, the electric tow tractors can move aircraft at up to 25 kilometers per hour emission-free. However, because the energy requirement of the vehicles for processing the towing orders is one day twice as high as the capacity of the accumulators, the lithium-ion battery system must then be recharged as quickly as possible in interruptions of the work. This should be possible with the help of a charging infrastructure built up for this purpose.

The batteries of the electric tugs absorb only climate-neutral electricity, as Lufthansa continues. The Group aims to achieve a neutral carbon footprint by 2050. As early as 2030, the Group aims to halve its net CO₂ emissions compared to 2019 through reduction and compensation. In air traffic itself, the Lufthansa Group is focusing primarily on accelerated fleet modernization and maximum efficiency of flight operations. In addition, the increased use of sustainable aviation fuels such as e-fuels is of crucial importance for them.

In addition to the electric tugs, the replacement of the auxiliary engines of the aircraft is considered the key to reducing the CO2 emissions of air traffic on the ground. These kerosene-powered auxiliary engines are used, for example, to cool the aircraft in the parking positions. In its climate protection program, the Frankfurt airport operator Fraport is working, among other things, to make the operation of these auxiliary engines superfluous.