The four-engine jet Lufthansa couldn't retire: the story of the A340

In 1987 Airbus was still the underdog. Boeing owned long-haul flying with the 747, and Airbus wanted in with two new widebodies at once: a twin called the A330 for shorter routes, and a four-engine version called the A340 for the long ones. The two shared a wing and most of a fuselage, and they were launched together in June 1987.

Four engines made sense at the time. The rules for twin-engine jets over open ocean were strict, and the longest routes across the Pacific were still four-engine territory. Airbus had also picked a remarkable engine for the new jet: the IAE SuperFan, a geared design with a variable-pitch fan that promised to burn about a fifth less fuel than the V2500 it was based on. Lufthansa signed a preliminary deal for fifteen aircraft on the strength of it.

Then, two months before Airbus launched the program, the SuperFan was gone.

On April 7, 1987, International Aero Engines put the SuperFan on indefinite hold. Its engineers had run into problems with the gearbox and the variable-pitch fan, and the company was not confident it would be ready in time. Airbus had dropped it from the offer the day before.

Airbus launched the A340 anyway, two months later, with the engine it could get: the CFM56-5C, a reliable design built for single-aisle jets. Four of them could fly the A340, with very little power to spare. To win back some of the lost range, Airbus lengthened the wingspan by about 8.5 feet so the wings could carry more fuel. Pilots noticed. The A340 became known for long, shallow climbs, and an old joke says it only gains altitude because the Earth curves away underneath it.

It first flew on October 25, 1991, and Lufthansa and Air France put it into service on March 15, 1993. On the routes it was built for, the A340-300 held its own: against Boeing's first 777 it burned about 5% less fuel per trip while carrying slightly fewer people.

The answer to why airlines turned against the A340 arrived in June 1995. Boeing's 777 entered service as the first airliner approved from its very first day to fly up to three hours from the nearest airport on two engines. That rule, ETOPS, had been loosening for years, and the 777 blew it open. A twin could now fly almost any ocean route the A340 could, with two engines to fuel and maintain instead of four.

Airbus pushed back with the one thing the 777 couldn't claim. At the 2002 Farnborough Air Show it rolled out the slogan "four engines for long haul." Virgin Atlantic painted it on the side of its A340s, and Richard Branson described it as a $5 million campaign. Boeing and the American engine makers were not amused.

Airbus had a bigger answer already in the works. In December 1997 it had launched two much larger A340s. One would fly farther than any airliner before it. The other would be the longest passenger jet in the world.

The A340-600 entered service in August 2002 at 247 feet long, more than 13 feet longer than a 747-400. Lufthansa's version came with a detail passengers still talk about: the economy restrooms were downstairs. A small gate in the economy cabin opened onto a staircase down to five lavatories on the same level as the cargo hold.

The smaller A340-500 went the other way, trading seats for fuel. In June 2004, Singapore Airlines used it to launch the longest flight in the world, Newark to Singapore nonstop, more than eighteen hours in the air. By 2008 the airline had taken out every economy seat and was flying it with a hundred business-class seats.

Both aircraft did what Airbus promised. The problem was a Boeing jet that entered service the same year as the Singapore flight, the 777-300ER. It carried a similar load on two engines, and the A340-600 burned about 12% more fuel than it did. While fuel was cheap, airlines could live with that gap.

In July 2008, oil hit $147 a barrel. A four-engine jet means four engines to feed and four engines to overhaul, and the A340 had no way around that math. Orders dried up, and airlines replaced their A340s with twins as fast as they could get them.

Airbus formally ended production in November 2011. It had built 377 A340s across every version, and only 97 of them were the big -600. Boeing sold the 777-300ER by the hundreds over the same years. Singapore Airlines dropped the Newark flight in 2013 and sold its five A340-500s back to Airbus as part of a deal for new A380s and A350s. Values of used A340s collapsed, and many were broken up for parts while they were still fairly young.

One thing never went wrong for the A340, though. In more than thirty years, no A340 has ever had a fatal accident. Two flights came very close to changing that.

On August 2, 2005, an Air France A340 landed at Toronto in a violent thunderstorm, ran off the end of the runway and slid into a ravine, where it caught fire. All 309 people on board got out alive.

On March 20, 2009, an Emirates A340-500 began its takeoff roll at Melbourne, bound for Dubai with 275 people on board. Before departure, the first officer had entered the aircraft's weight into the computer as 262.9 metric tons. It actually weighed 362.9. The engines were set for an aircraft a hundred tons lighter. The tail scraped along the runway, the jet only left the ground past the end of the pavement, hit a light, struck an antenna array with its landing gear and barely missed the perimeter fence. Nobody was hurt. Australian officials later called it as close as the country had ever come to a major aviation catastrophe. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau's report, AO-2009-012, is the authoritative account.

So the A340 had a clean record and almost no buyers. Then, in 2020, the world stopped flying. Lufthansa's answer was Teruel, an airport in the high desert of eastern Spain where airlines store and scrap their aircraft. In the spring of 2020 it began flying its remaining seventeen A340-600s there and announced it would retire the whole fleet. It left itself one way back: up to ten could return if demand recovered faster than expected.

Demand did exactly that. In the summer of 2022, five came out of the desert and went back to work from Munich, flying first class to the United States while Lufthansa waited for new jets. In 2023, five more returned to Frankfurt. That made ten, the most Lufthansa had allowed for. Every one of those comebacks was supposed to be temporary, a year or two at most. They were still flying passengers across the Atlantic in the fall of 2026.

The aircraft that were supposed to replace them never showed up on time. Lufthansa is the launch customer for Boeing's newest widebody, the 777-9, and has twenty on order. The first ones were due in 2020. The program slipped year after year through engine and certification problems, and Boeing has booked about $15 billion in charges on it. Lufthansa's current estimate for its first 777-9 is early 2027, seven years late. Its other replacement, the A350-1000, ran late as well.

In October 2025, Lufthansa's CEO Carsten Spohr told investors the company had never had a problem this significant in its history, and the -600s were extended into 2026. That extension ran out on October 19. Flight LH419 left Washington Dulles the evening before with 267 passengers and landed in Frankfurt the next morning. The aircraft, D-AIHW, delivered new in 2008, had flown more than 66,000 hours.

The smaller A340-300s are still flying, and they are still tied to Boeing's schedule. Lufthansa has said that if the 777-9 slips again, A340s it has kept in reserve will go back into service.

If you want to fly on an A340, you still can, for a little while. Lufthansa plans to keep its eleven A340-300s until at least September 2027, all flying out of Frankfurt. Swiss has four left, plans to retire the last one by early 2028, and wants to give it to the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne. About seventy A340s were still active worldwide at the start of 2026, most of them with smaller airlines.

You can see every A340 in the air right now on the live A340 tracker, read the A340-600 guide, or watch the stories of the A350 and the MD-11, two other long-haul jets whose fates were decided by engines.