Deutsche Lufthansa AG Chief Financial Officer Simone Menne will step down effective Aug. 31, in a surprise departure from Europe’s third-largest airline. Menne, 56, will resign to “pursue individual career options,” the company said in an e-mailed statement Thursday, adding that it would choose a successor shortly. Menne, a member of the carrier’s board since 2012, said last year that she eventually wanted to head a company in the DAX30, Germany’s benchmark stock index. “It’s a surprise, there was no indication that this might happen,” Gerald Khoo, an analyst at Liberium Capital Limited, said by telephone from London. “She is well-regarded by investors. They will want to know why this happened, and why it happened now. It’s unusual given Lufthansa’s history of succession planning.” Lufthansa, led by Chief Executive Officer Carsten Spohr, has reined in expansion plans as a glut of plane seats depresses ticket prices and travelers delay bookings amid fears of terror attacks. Capacity growth this year will trail the previous target of 6 percent, Spohr said in an interview last month. The cuts will come on short- and long-haul routes at Lufthansa’s namesake brand while the Eurowings low-cost arm will continue to grow, he said. As low oil prices have led to record profits at Lufthansa and other airlines and spurred expansion, summer capacity plans failed to take into account the impact of terror attacks in Paris, Brussels and Turkey. The company will brief investors about expansion plans for Eurowings on Friday. Proven Worth A graduate in business administration, Menne began her professional career in the auditing department of ITT in the U.S. in 1987 before joining Lufthansa as an auditor in April 1989. Ten years later she took over the airline’s financial management and human resources in southwest Europe, rising to the same position for all of Europe two years after that. Outside Lufthansa, Menne is a member of the supervisory boards of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and Deutsche Post AG. “In Simone Menne we are losing an experienced executive who has proven her worth time and again in her long Lufthansa career,” Supervisory Board Chairman Wolfgang Mayrhuber said in the statement.