LOT Polish Airlines is retiring its last Embraer E170, and the farewell flight is a nostalgic one. On October 30, flight LO222 from Vienna to Warsaw Chopin will close out 22 years of E170 operations at the airline — the very same city pair where the type flew its first commercial service back in 2004, just before Poland joined the EU.
The numbers behind the aircraft's career are striking. According to data from Flightradar24, LOT's E170s carried roughly 13.8 million passengers across nearly 300,000 flights, logging more than 455,000 flight hours and covering over 200 million nautical miles. That's a serious workload for a jet that many travellers barely notice as it shuttles them around Central Europe.
The final departure leaves Vienna at 3:35 PM and lands in Warsaw at 4:50 PM — a hop of barely an hour. Recent days show how routine the route is: the four flights before the farewell took between 53 and 67 minutes. Interestingly, not all of those were even flown by E170s; LOT mixed in E170 shorts and a Boeing 737-800, a sign of how flexibly the airline deploys its smaller fleet.
LOT's E170 story began on March 8, 2004, when the first example, registered SP-LDA, arrived after a long ferry flight from Brazil with stops in Recife, Cape Verde and Málaga. Eleven days later it entered revenue service. The jet was a technological step change for the carrier — LOT's first with winglets and fully electronic fly-by-wire controls — and went on to serve destinations including Prague, Copenhagen and Budapest.
Spokesperson Krzysztof Moczulski called the retirement of the last airframe, SP-LDH, "a symbolic moment that closes a specific chapter." The E190 and E195 aren't going anywhere, though: LOT operates 22 of the larger Embraers, and they'll take over LO222 from November 1. Passengers will notice little difference in comfort — the E190 keeps the same 2-2 layout with no middle seats in either business or economy, with 31-inch seat pitch and 18-inch width in economy — while the airline gains better range and lower fuel burn.
For aviation enthusiasts and regular Central Europe hopper-fliers alike, this is a small but genuine end of an era. LOT was the world's first airline to fly the E170 in revenue service, and the type's retirement removes a rarity from European skies. If you want to spot one of the last examples in LOT colours, the window is closing fast — the remaining E170s are being phased out as the bigger Embraers and Boeing narrowbodies absorb their schedules. Planespotting at Warsaw Chopin or Vienna in the coming weeks is your best bet before the type disappears from the carrier's roster entirely.
