Airline Name
LaudamotionThe above is the Ryanair logo but the Niki Lauda logo used for a period of 2 months is below,
IATA: OE / ICAO: LDM / Callsign: LAUDA MOTION
Country of Origin
Austria
Aircraft Types Used (from those available in WoA)
A320 (A320-200) (33 operated),At INN below,
The Ryanair era livery change, (Practically the same as the current Lauda livery just with a website),
Both engine options operated.
A321 (A321-200) (4 operated),
Not in-game,
GLF6 (Gulfstream G650) (1 operated),
Why should this airline be added?
Laudamotion was the final airline founded by F1 legend Niki Lauda prior to his passing, after Lauda and Niki, when he bought the private airline Amira Air, renaming it Laudamotion in 2016. Not until the collapse of Air Berlin and ofc Niki with it did Niki Lauda decide to switch the operations from private aviation to civil aviation, having got approval to takeover the of Niki by the creditor’s committee in January 2018. He set to work rebranding the Niki aircraft he’d acquired to Laudamotion but retaining the Air Berlin look for a time, making a deal with Condor to operate flights for them using 3 aircraft, until on the 20th March 2018 when Ryanair bought a 25% stake in the airline with options to purchase 50% is approval was granted by EU officials.The airline in the meantime went ahead with plans to operate from 7 German cities and Zurich as well as Vienna, but the Zurich plans were dropped in May 2018 due to lack of aircraft for leasing. By August 2018, Ryanair successfully took over Laudamotion with the 50% stake addition being approved whereby they announced they would take on 100 new A321-200NEO’s, however, this failed to materialise due to the pandemic. In March 2019, the airline changed its name from Laudamotion to just Lauda, which we have in-game. In 2020 due to the pandemic and the usual Ryanair meddling, the Vienna base was shut down with a large amount of opposition from labour unions and the Austrian government followed by the closing of the Stuttgart base in August 2020 and finally by the airline itself in October 2020, with all the assets transferred across to the new Lauda Europe which is the current airline and the one in-game.
It’s not an airline which really stands out due to the early livery being mostly Air Berlin and then the later livery just being Lauda’s but it could make for an interesting addition for Austrian operations and for Innsbruck routes, plus a piece of history linking to one of the best F1 drivers in the world I feel is something worth remembering.
The pre-Ryanair routes and plans,
Post Ryanair routes,
