Lufthansa's services to Indonesia

Germany's national air carrier, Lufthansa, landed in Jakarta for the first time on July 2, 1967. The flight was a Boeing 707 which took 19 hours to fly from Germany, via Dhahran, Karachi, Bombay and Bangkok, before touching down at Jakarta's old Kemayoran airport.

The wide-body jets (DC10s) first arrived in the mid-1970s, shortly before a second weekly flight to Jakarta was introduced in 1975.

Demand for air transportation -- both passenger and cargo -- has grown dramatically since the early 1980s, in response to the rapid economic reforms introduced by the Indonesian government at that time.

Increases in air services have corresponded with the development of tourism, which has become the fourth-largest earner of foreign exchange in the country.

On April 1, 1990, this culminated in the introduction of Lufthansa services linking Denpasar directly with Germany, catering to the ever-increasing number of foreign tourists bound for the idyllic island of Bali.

From Nov. 1, 1996, Lufthansa will connect Indonesia with Frankfurt nine times a week with one-stop Boeing 747-400 services. This includes daily flights from Jakarta via Singapore and two flights each week from Denpasar via Bangkok.

To serve the consistent growth in customer demand in this 13,677-island republic, Lufthansa maintains its own offices in Jakarta, Denpasar and Surabaya. The airline has many other interests and joint ventures in the country, from an aircraft maintenance project set up jointly with Garuda in 1991 to other business enterprises involving technology and know-how transfer to the Indonesian civil aviation industry.