Lufthansa has begun its farewell to the Boeing 747-400. At the end of the summer schedule in late October 2026, the airline is grounding two of the four-engined jets for the whole winter, and it plans to say a final goodbye to the type next year1. The decision closes a chapter that includes one of the stranger aircraft storage stories of the pandemic. In 2020 Lufthansa parked six 747-400s at Twente Airport, a small regional airport near Enschede in the east of the Netherlands. Landing there was allowed. Taking off again turned out to be a different matter23.

More than 56 years of the 747 at Lufthansa

Lufthansa took delivery of its first Boeing 747 on 9 March 1970: a 747-130 registered D-ABYA and known internally as "Yankee Alpha". On 26 April 1970 it flew its first scheduled service from Frankfurt to New York, making Lufthansa the second international airline after Pan Am, and the first in Europe, to carry passengers on the jumbo. After the original model the airline also flew the 747-200 and the 747-400, and on 2 May 2012 it became the first passenger airline in the world to receive the 747-84.

Now the 747-400 is leaving. In April 2026 the Lufthansa Group announced a package of measures after kerosene prices more than doubled compared with the period before the Iran war. The last four Airbus A340-600s leave the fleet in October, and two 747-400s are grounded from October onwards for the coming winter. According to the group, the package removes "particularly inefficient aircraft" from flight operations early1. Lufthansa has not said which two aircraft are affected, and the announcement does not cover the newer 747-81.

Six jumbos to Twente

Between early June and late July 2020 Lufthansa ferried six 747-400s to Twente for storage, most of them on a short flight of about 40 minutes from Frankfurt and one directly from Beijing after maintenance2. They were D-ABTK, D-ABTL, D-ABVO, D-ABVP, D-ABVS and D-ABVX5. Twente has a runway of nearly 8,000 feet, so a 747 can land there without difficulty, and an aircraft dismantling company, Aircraft End-of-Life Solutions (AELS), is based on the airfield. The original plan was to scrap the jets at Twente2.

That changed in the autumn. Lufthansa sold five 747-400s to the American recycler GE Aviation Materials. A Lufthansa spokesperson said the aircraft would go to Mojave in California, where parts would return to the used market after re-certification and the airframes would be disassembled and recycled5. Some of the jets at Twente were among them, and the first was due to leave on 26 October 202026.

Allowed to land, not to take off

The Dutch Human Environment and Transport Inspectorate (ILT), which oversees the country's airports, blocked the departure. A spokesperson said: "Twente Airport simply does not have the correct safety certificate. Larger aircraft such as the Boeings can land at Twente, but only for dismantling. The airport infrastructure is not suitable for taking off larger and heavier aircraft"2. According to the inspectorate, the airport had planned the required changes to its infrastructure since 2019 but had not carried them out, and its departure procedures had not been approved either6.

The ILT was also critical of how the jets had arrived. It told aeroTELEGRAPH that the first two of the six had landed in breach of the safety certificate in force at the time, and that the airport's management knew before the last four landed that they would not be allowed to depart6. The airport's director called the situation "too absurd for words" and went to court3.

A one-off exemption

On 29 October 2020, before the case was heard, the inspectorate and the airport's owner, Technology Base, reached an agreement. The ILT granted a one-off exemption, and according to its announcement both parties agreed that the situation could not be repeated5. The aircraft had to carry minimal fuel and be as light as possible on take-off3, with just enough fuel to reach Frankfurt, where they would be refuelled for the onward flight2.

The first to leave was D-ABVP, on 3 November 2020, heading via Frankfurt to Mojave. D-ABVS and D-ABVO were scheduled to follow in November and December 20205. The last three were meant to be gone by the end of June 2021, but in April 2021 the airport won a court ruling allowing them to stay until 2022. Lufthansa moved D-ABTK anyway: it left Twente on 26 April 2021 for storage in Teruel, Spain, but bad weather there sent it to Frankfurt instead. According to a Lufthansa spokesperson, reactivation work had already begun when the court ruled7.

By the summer of 2021 demand was returning. Lufthansa collected the second-to-last jet in early August, and on Monday 20 September 2021 D-ABTL flew from Twente to Frankfurt in 41 minutes as the last of the six8. After 15 months of storage it went back to Frankfurt to return to service9.

How an airliner is taken apart

The Lufthansa jets were not scrapped at Twente, but AELS shows what happens to an aircraft at the end of its life. The company was founded in 2006 and says it has disassembled and dismantled more than 75 aircraft, naming KLM, Lufthansa, TNT and Iberia among its partners10. The work starts with buying the aircraft. Mechanics then remove everything that can be reused. Parts that can fly again go to a selected repair shop for testing, overhaul and re-certification and are sold with a warranty of 6 to 12 months. Other parts are sold "as removed", and every part comes with complete paperwork so that its history can be traced11.

Engines follow a separate route. AELS focuses on the airframe and does not remove the engines itself: they go to engine shops or manufacturers, or back to the airline or lessor12. Material that cannot be reused as a part is recycled into raw material for other industries, and AELS says it has given more than a million kilos of material a new life this way. Cockpits and cabin sections are sometimes reused for training, for example pilot and crew simulations and safety drills13. How much of an aircraft is recovered in total depends on the company and the type. Airbus says the process used by the French recycler Tarmac Aerosave recovers around 90 percent of an aircraft's weight14.

Where to see a Lufthansa 747-400 now

Not at Twente: the last of the six left in September 20218. In the air, the type can still be followed. During the night of 17 to 18 October 2026, free ADS-B data on adsb.lol showed D-ABVM and D-ABVY airborne, among others15. Anyone hoping to fly the 747-400 with Lufthansa has until some point in 2027, when the airline plans its final farewell1. What happens to the last aircraft afterwards, whether sale, storage or scrapping, Lufthansa has not announced.