Welcome
Wearing a special 50th anniversary livery, TUI fly Deutschland Boeing 737 MAX 8, D-AMAH (c/n 44629), landing at Corfu in June 2024
Hello and welcome to the September issue of Airliner World, incorporating Airports of the World. A standout feature in this month’s edition is, of course, the highly anticipated return of the Global Airline Guide. Spanning 40 pages, this unrivalled dataset – produced in collaboration with our partners at ch-aviation – offers a definitive snapshot of the world’s airline fleets. Alongside fleet listings, the guide also covers startups and failures, alliances, deliveries and aircraft in storage. New for this year is a breakdown of the active fleet by type, revealing just under 30,000 airframes currently in service worldwide. It’s an essential reference tool – and one we’re proud to bring you once again. As ever, we’d love your feedback. What would you like to see included in next year’s guide? And how might we make the data even clearer or more accessible? Drop us a line and let us know. Elsewhere in the issue, our cover story puts the spotlight on leisure travel giant TUI Group and its complex airline history. With five carriers across Europe – TUI Airways, TUI fly Deutschland, Netherlands, Belgium and Nordic – this is no ordinary family tree. Our resident historian Lee Cross has untangled the group’s lineage to bring you a comprehensive deep-dive, complemented by a fantastic visual timeline on pages 128-129 to help make sense of it all.