On Friday 30 October 2026, an Embraer E170 registered SP-LDH flew from Warsaw to Vienna and back, and then LOT Polish Airlines took it out of service. It was the airline’s last E170, and with it LOT closed a story it had started on the very same route more than 22 years earlier.

On 17 March 2004, LOT flew the first E170 passenger service anywhere in the world, from Warsaw to Vienna. Over 22 years, LOT says, its ten E170s carried 13.8 million passengers on nearly 300,000 flights.

The first airline to fly it

LOT was not the jet’s original launch customer. When Embraer launched the E-Jet family at the 1999 Paris Air Show, the first orders for the E170 came from the French airline Régional and the Swiss carrier Crossair. Crossair disappeared in the collapse of Swissair and its order was cancelled, while Régional deferred, leaving LOT to put the new jet into service first.

The first LOT E170, SP-LDA, arrived in Warsaw on 8 March 2004 after a ferry flight from Embraer’s factory at São José dos Campos in Brazil, with stops in Recife, Espargos in Cape Verde and Málaga. Nine days later it flew the Warsaw to Vienna service that started the type’s commercial career, weeks before Poland joined the European Union.

The E170 was the smallest of Embraer’s first-generation E-Jets, and LOT went on to fly all four: the E170, E175, E190 and E195. It liked the first one enough that, within four years, it had ordered 12 more of the stretched E175. According to the airline, each LOT Embraer E170 seated between 70 and 76 passengers, cruised at 871 km/h and had a range of 3,700 kilometres.

Firsts for the fleet

For LOT, the little Embraer brought several firsts. It was the first aircraft in the fleet with winglets and the first with fully electronic fly-by-wire flight controls. Passengers mostly noticed the cabin: two seats on each side of the aisle and no middle seat.

Over 22 years the fleet covered more than 230 million kilometres in over 455,000 flight hours, on domestic and European routes to cities such as Prague, Copenhagen and Budapest. A few aircraft became flying billboards. SP-LDC carried Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” to promote the Małopolska region in 2008, SP-LDF wore a Ptasie Mleczko confectionery livery, and SP-LDH itself once promoted the film Planes: Fire & Rescue.

One last rotation to Vienna

LOT chose the route for the farewell deliberately. SP-LDH flew a final Warsaw–Vienna–Warsaw rotation, and the closing leg, flight LO222 from Vienna, brought the E170 era home to Warsaw Chopin Airport that afternoon, Simple Flying and Aviácion al Día reported.

In its farewell, LOT thanked the crews who flew the jets, the mechanics who maintained them and the millions of passengers who travelled on them. For many LOT pilots and cabin crew, the E170 was the aircraft on which they built their careers.

The airline had only recently said goodbye to its Boeing 737 Classics, and the E170 is the next step in a wider fleet change.

A passenger’s trip report aboard a LOT Embraer E170 from Vienna to Warsaw, the route on which the type both started and ended its LOT career.

What comes after the E170

The retirement does not end Embraer’s presence at LOT. The airline still flies the E175, E190 and E195, plus the newer E195-E2, which joined the fleet in 2024. But the long-term replacement is already ordered from Embraer’s rival: on 16 June 2025, at the Paris Air Show, LOT signed a firm order for 40 Airbus A220s, 20 of the smaller A220-100 and 20 A220-300s, with deliveries from 2027.

LOT has already begun withdrawing some of its E175s ahead of the A220’s arrival. The airline that put the E-Jet family into service in 2004 is now, one aircraft at a time, flying it out again. SP-LDH was simply first in line.

Sources: LOT Polish Airlines press office, aeroTELEGRAPH, Simple Flying, Aviación al Día, Wikipedia (Embraer E-Jet family; LOT Polish Airlines)