Lufthansa Group has suspended night flights to and from Beirut until July 31 due to the situation in the Middle East, a spokesman said on Monday.
The spokesman said the change began on June 29 and that daytime flights would operate as before.
Swiss International Air Lines, a subsidiary of Lufthansa Group, also said it would move its night flights to Beirut to daytime flights until the end of July “due to political developments on the Lebanon-Israel border.”
The airlines did not provide detailed information on the nature of the threat.
In March, the Lebanese government said it would lodge an urgent complaint with the United Nations Security Council over Israel’s alleged disruption of its navigation systems, which it said affected the safety of civil aviation in the airspace of Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport.
Swiss International Air Lines said Monday that the change in its schedule was not related to possible GPS interference on its planes to Beirut.
“Our pilots are trained to deal with such situations and our aircraft have several other systems on board when one system is no longer reliable,” a Swiss spokesperson said.
Previously, crews did not spend the night in Lebanon after leaving Zurich, but stayed on board the plane to prepare for the return flight, the spokesman added. (Reporting by Ilona Wissenbach in Frankfurt and John Revill in Zurich; Writing by Friederike Heine; Editing by Matthias Williams, Rachel More and Barbara Lewis)
