GERMAN airline Luthansa is doing good business transporting English football fans to the World Cup in Japan and South Korea.
Dieter Grotepass, the General Manager for the UK & Ireland, is delighted from a commercial point of view that his company is helping 5,000 supporters cheer on Sven's men.
His colleagues back in Germany, meanwhile, are not transporting as many Germans as they might have expected.
"I think they still remember England 5, Germany 1," he joked when he popped in to the Bolton Evening News offices. "In Germany, people are really careful about spending their money -- Japan is a long way away."
About a third of the English passengers are flying from Manchester, the airline's second most important airport after London Heathrow.
Luthansa's Manchester operation started in 1956. The company carried 420,000 passengers to and from the city in 2001 -- an increase of 3.5 per cent on the previous year.
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