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"Lady Agnes" has been heading northwest for more than three decades.

That is how long the passenger plane has been standing on a meadow 60 kilometers from Berlin - discarded.

You can celebrate a wedding in your cabin.

The Ilyushin Il-62 is one of the last witnesses to Interflug.

The state airline of the GDR was the pride of its crews and the government, but 30 years ago Interflug landed forever.

The memories of ups and downs remain.

And a time when flying was something special.

“Nobody would have said a push of juice back then,” says Andrea Beu, a former flight attendant at Interflug.

"Instead, you were admired in uniform in the S-Bahn and also spoken to in a friendly manner." Even more so than in the West, stewardess was an absolute dream job in the GDR, as the Berliner confirms.

Interflug fans can indulge in memories inside the "Lady Agnes"

Source: dpa / Jörg Carstensen

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Because flying was a privilege, especially when it came to the West.

Interflug, which started out as "Deutsche Lufthansa" (East), flew to destinations such as Bucharest, Havana and Moscow, but also to Cairo and Singapore, because that brought West money into the cash register.

The crews for the “non-socialist economic area” were carefully selected by the Stasi.

Reliability was important, "escape from the republic" had to be avoided at all costs.

The last flight from Interflug to Berlin-Schönefeld

That was long ago.

On April 30, 1991, a Tupolev from Vienna landed as the last Interflug plane in Berlin-Schönefeld, the former central airport of the GDR.

His terminal was also decommissioned two months ago.

Interflug was officially closed on April 30, 1991.

Klaus Petzold was the flight captain in charge on the last flight with the Tupolew Tu-134

Source: dpa / Peer Grimm

On online marketplaces, collectors trade in relics of the airline, which was given its new name in 1958 after a hopeless dispute with West Lufthansa: model aircraft, toiletry bags and badges, pilot's hats, beer glasses and creamer - all with the Interflug emblem.

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But the “Interflug family” also often maintains contact with one another.

Numerous pilots, flight engineers, navigators and stewardesses celebrated the 50th anniversary of Interflug in the Berlin zoo.

Until October 1990, Interflug, originally with 8,000 employees, was responsible for almost all tasks of civil GDR aviation, from commercial and agricultural flights to airports and air traffic control.

In her early years she had also offered domestic flights, for example to Barth and Heringsdorf on the Baltic Sea.

April 3, 1990: With the start of an Airbus A 310 to Mallorca, a TransEuropean program began, which Interflug offered together with TUI.

86 GDR citizens booked the four-day trip

Source: pa / Matthias Hiek / dpa-ZB (ADN)

The highlights were the Leipzig trade fairs with their special flight programs.

One flight ended in the largest aircraft disaster on German soil: an Ilyushin Il-62 crashed near Königs Wusterhausen near Berlin in 1972, none of the 156 occupants survived.

Airline crew monitored in the GDR

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In 33 years of flight operations, however, bizarre stories also played out in the machines, such as those brought about by the Cold War.

Popular stories revolve around missions with West German charter tourists on a foreign exchange flight to Bulgaria, with 150 fishermen from Montevideo to the GDR, a solidarity flight to Hanoi with bicycles for Ho Chi Minh fighters or about the transport of 80,000 chicks from Budapest to Syria.

Interflug also made it into the “Guinness Book of Records”: with the non-stop flight of an Airbus A310 in November 1989 from Japan to Schönefeld.

Most of them suspected that on every flight to non-socialist countries there was always an unofficial employee of the Ministry of State Security on board to watch over the crew's conduct.

As an unmarried young woman, stewardess Andrea Beu had to wait until the fall of the Berlin Wall before she was allowed to go west.

"I would have been there from my time on duty, but you couldn't demand that," says today's online editor.

Interflug donated the "Lady Agnes" to the town of Stölln - in memory of Otto Lilienthal, who crashed here during one of his attempts to fly and died shortly afterwards

Source: dpa / Jörg Carstensen

A few more months of interesting trips to Cairo or Brazzaville followed, until the Treuhand decided in 1991 to liquidate the airline with around 3,000 employees.

“I found out about it from the newspaper and then went to the Treuhand to demo.

We were so disappointed. "

Hope for takeover by Lufthansa failed

The works councilor and schedule planner at the time, Ilona Ritter, says: "We all assumed that we would continue our routes and then fell from the clouds." In close cooperation with the western trade unions, preparations had been made for a takeover by Lufthansa or British Airways, both of which ultimately did not come into play.

Even if Interflug stopped operating 30 years ago, the airline still has a lot of fans

Source: pa / ZB / Waltraud Grubitzsch

It was "very mysterious" that it went with the trust at the time, says Ritter, who later negotiated tariffs for the Cockpit Association.

When Lufthansa itself was close to bankruptcy just a few months later, it became clear that the West German crane would have been too weak to take over.

After the end of Interflug, some of their aircraft still played an important role in the unified Germany. The Chancellor even flew an Airbus A310 built in 1989 for years. The aircraft was ready to fly - ordered by Erich Honecker through Franz Josef Strauss, flown by Merkel.