Lufthansa is starting new daily services between Heathrow and Dresden, Manchester and Suttgart and Edinburgh and Dusseldorf this summer.

The Heathrow-Dresden service will start on April 19 with a 12.35 departure, and will use an Airbus A319 with 138 seats in a two-class configuration.

Lufthansa said there was business and leisure market for the service, as Dresden had gone through a radical transformation in the past few years, and the surrounding Elbe Valley was a Unesco World Heritage site with appeal to tourists.

The Manchester-Stuttgart service starts on April 12 and the Edinburgh-Dusseldorf route starts on April 26.

There will also be weekly summer services to Dusseldorf from Newquay, Jersey and Inverness, and the reintroduction of the second teatime service from Edinburgh to Frankfurt.

UK and Ireland general manager Marianne Sammann said the new services and increased frequencies reinforce the importance of the UK market for Lufthansa.

The summer schedule will also see Lufthansa resume flights to Iraq after a 20-year break with the start of a service between Frankfurt and Erbil from April 25.

Erbil, in the north of Iraq, will be serviced four times a week from Frankfurt using an Airbus A319 with 132 seats in a two-class configuration.

Lufthansa said demand for flights to Iraq was growing and many diplomatic and commercial organisations were setting up in Erbil, the country’s fourth largest city. Lufthansa also plans to resume flights to Baghdad this year.

Other new destination in the programme are Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which will be served from Munich from March 28, and Tallinn, capital of Estonia, also from Munich.

Lufthansa is also due to introduce its first Airbus 380 in June. The airline will announce the routes to be service by the super jumbo in April.

Overall, Lufthansa will serve 204 destinations in 81 countries this summer, with 12,853 flights weekly compared with 12,860 in 2009.

Despite a smaller fleet, overall capacity  is up year-on-year by 3.6 per cent, following the replacement of older aircraft by larger types.