Papenburg, 15 August 2019 – With the symbolic steel cutting ceremony at MEYER WERFT, work has begun on the next cruise ship for AIDA Cruises. Like the AIDAnova that was delivered at the end of 2018, this ship will be fitted with a particularly environ-mentally friendly liquefied natural gas (LNG) propulsion system.

The button to start the computer-controlled steel cutting machine was pressed by Sven Fahle, Project Manager at AIDA Cruises, together with the MEYER WERFT team, thus starting production of the next LNG cruise ship. Delivery is planned for spring 2021. MEYER WERFT will be delivering a third ship in this class to AIDA Cruises in 2023.

"We are very pleased to work with AIDA Cruises and Carnival Corporation at further es-tablishing LNG as a fuel in the cruise industry. We will also be implementing other inno-vative technologies on board this ship", says Stephan Schmees, Executive Board Member Project Management Ships at MEYER WERFT.

This generation of ships for AIDA Cruises uses LNG engines by Caterpillar / MaK, which fulfil the strictest environmental regulations. This class of ships has been devel-oped and designed with a focus on energy efficiency. The planning and design activities gave absolute priority to heat recovery, innovative electric motors, LED lighting, ship au-tomation and glazing, all geared to energy efficiency, optimized underwater paintwork to reduce resistance, weight-optimized material selection and many other topics.

The new ships for AIDA Cruises have capacity for around 2,600 cabins, with a rating of 183,900 GRT.