Paris (AFP)

The CEO of XL Airways has launched Friday a call to raise the 35 million euros needed according to him to avoid abandoning passengers on the tarmac and restart the activity of his company, the second in less than three weeks to ending up in deadlock in France.

"We are in an unbearable competitive situation for part of the French flag," said Laurent Magnin on RTL the day after the application for placement in receivership of the company.

On the subject of customers, "we will be in a few days in a situation where we will not transport them if we are not taken back," he said.

The long-haul company, owned by the French holding company DreamJet Participations since 2016, announced late Thursday that it declared itself insolvent and asked for its placement in receivership.

"The hope [of finding a buyer] we will have until the closure of the company, (...) this company needs 35 million to leave, it's a message. have resources in this country, "said Magnin.

"We are assisting XL Airways, in connection with the services of Bercy, to promote a possible recovery," said his side Friday morning the Secretary of State for Transport Jean-Baptiste Djebbari during a visit to Brussels.

He said he "activated [Friday morning] the mutual aid system and in the same way" as Aigle Azur, another company in distress: "we will solicit the airlines so that they allow travelers who see their canceled tickets to have a repatriation solution ".

The minister insisted on the difference of situations between Aigle Azur, in liquidation and pending the choice of a possible buyer, and XL Airways: the first, specialized in the Mediterranean, who has "paid, in quotation marks, the fruits of [its] diversification "in the long haul and the second" which lacks capital to develop or to resist, since it is in a very competitive situation ".

- "Stop doing the defensive" -

Elisabeth Borne, Minister of the Ecological and Solidarity Transition, affirmed for its part on Europe 1 that the government was "with this company for the last months to help it to find new investors".

In addition to "unbridled international competition", Mr. Magnin, who vilified his low-cost competitors, questioned a "structural problem of costs [in France], social charges that are out of the ordinary compared to the rest of the world" estimating that "the situation of the French companies was mostly deficit".

"We must stop doing defensive, we must do the preventive on the French air," he said to the attention of President Emmanuel Macron.

Professionals in the sector have been denouncing for years the loss of competitiveness of the French flag because of the weight of taxes, royalties and social charges which, according to them, handicap them heavily against their competitors in Europe and the Gulf but also low-cost , which are strongly anchored on the medium-haul network in Europe, and which have recently been expanding over the long haul, particularly in the buoyant US market from Paris.

An analysis that Friday morning shared the unions SNPL, FO and CFDT.

"French companies can not fight on equal terms with this level of charges, taxes, royalties," said on Twitter the airline pilot Guillaume Schmid, vice president of SNPL Air France.

Raphaël Caccia, Secretary General of the Federal Air Force CFDT, has also questioned "the war on prices" and "overcapacity of air transport around the world".

Headquartered in Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle, XL Airways employs 570 employees. It has transported 730,000 passengers in 2018 on four continents, mainly in North America, including the United States, the Caribbean and China.

© 2019 AFP