The AI Impact Award, presented by the German business newspaper manager magazin and Porsche Consulting, honors companies that successfully and effectively apply artificial intelligence in real-world practice. The award highlights solutions that create genuine economic and societal added value.
Lufthansa has been nominated for the AI Impact Award 2026 in the Production and Supply Chain category, which honors solutions that make processes across production, logistics, or the supply chain more efficient, safer, or more sustainable. In a short interview, Philipp Krusemeyer, Senior Director Digital TechOps at Lufthansa, explains the challenges his team faced, how the AI-driven approach was developed, and which results are already visible today.
Mr. Krusemeyer, what operational and regulatory challenges pushed manual maintenance planning to its limits and increased the need for an AI-based approach?
Aircraft maintenance involves several thousand inspection and maintenance tasks per aircraft. All of these must be monitored and scheduled as efficiently as possible within the flight plan. In addition to grouping maintenance tasks in a technically meaningful way, planners also have to account for the availability of required resources. At the same time, conditions are constantly changing – for example due to short-notice aircraft swaps or missing spare parts, mechanics, tooling, or available hangar capacity.
With a fleet of more than 300 aircraft, this quickly becomes a complex puzzle that can no longer be fully managed by a single individual. As a result, we were losing valuable ground time for aircraft and were not always making efficient use of our production capacity. AI helps us create a holistically optimized maintenance plan that can also respond quickly to changing conditions. At the same time, planners are relieved of manual work and can focus more strongly on quality assurance.