Retrofitting the cabin with the existing C makes no sense. The new C cabin has not been certified for line- and retrofit, so waiting for that makes no sense either. Instead these 'sprinters' should come into the fleet as soon as possible so that the spare capacity creates opportunities to start the retrofit of the existing A359 fleet. The last retrofit campaign (2012-15) got delayed by a year because LH couldn't take capacity offline in the busy summer months. In the retrofit campaign before that (2003-06) they wetleased A330 from SN and B763 from OS/NG to expand in MUC and cover the delay of the A346 deliveries.

Already the capacity in MUC is completely stretched, the reopening of the Chinese market caught them by surprise and some routes to the US had to be downgauged to find capacity to serve China.