Friday, June 28, 2024
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The Board of Directors at SWISS has announced the appointment of Jens Fehlinger as the new Chief Executive Officer, effective from 1 October 2024. Fehlinger, aged 43, originally started his career as a pilot and has since held various management roles within the Lufthansa Group. Currently, he is the Managing Director of Lufthansa City Airlines. He will succeed Dieter Vranckx, who has been named a member of the Lufthansa Group Executive Board, starting his new role on 1 July 2024. Until Fehlinger steps into his role, Heike Birlenbach will act as the Interim CEO of SWISS.
Starting 1 October 2024, Jens Fehlinger will officially take over as CEO of Swiss International Air Lines (SWISS). His career with the Lufthansa Group began in 2006, progressing through various management positions including Head of Corporate Airline Strategy & Business Development at Lufthansa Airlines, and Head of Operations Performance Management & Analytics across the Lufthansa Group. He played a pivotal role during the COVID-19 crisis as the head of the Group’s crisis management office and later led the ReNew restructuring initiative.
In recent years, Fehlinger has co-managed Lufthansa CityLine and played a key role in launching and developing Lufthansa City Airlines as its Managing Director. He also holds a commercial pilot license and occasionally pilots the Airbus A320-family aircraft for Lufthansa CityLine.
Fehlinger has an academic background in aviation engineering and management from Bremen, as well as traffic and transport from Darmstadt, Germany. He also earned an Executive MBA from the IE Business School in Madrid.
A German national, Jens Fehlinger is married and a father to two children.
A connoisseur with vision
Reto Francioni, Chairman of the SWISS Board of Directors, is convinced that Jens Fehlinger is the right person to head Switzerland’s leading airline. “In Jens Fehlinger we have secured the services for our company of a genuine connoisseur of the air transport sector,” Francioni explains. “He has accumulated extensive experience in various areas within the Lufthansa Group; and he has proven well able to deliver innovations in our industry. He has shown vision, strategic flair and operational expertise, along with an ability to work closely with his teams, to establish a new airline; and, in doing so, he has confirmed his capacity to guide a company to success. With his personality, too, he will fit excellently not only into our SWISS Management Board but also into our particular SWISS culture. I look forward to working with him, and I wish him every success and satisfaction in his new position.”
“I am really looking forward to joining SWISS,” Jens Fehlinger adds. “It’s a great company that has performed outstandingly well, especially in the last few years, and that has emerged from the recent crisis as a sound and growing concern. It has achieved this above all through its dedicated, open and innovative team – a team that celebrates its Swissness with pride. This Swissness is a vital commodity which makes SWISS unique. I see it as my new duty to ensure that we continue to cultivate this invaluable company asset. And I am particularly looking forward to becoming part of the SWISS team.”
