High losses at Air Mauritius
Mauritius set to build a new national airline
The end of Air Mauritius is still looming. The government is therefore already preparing a new national airline.
Airbus A319 from Air Mauritius: Difficult position.
Airbus A319 from Air Mauritius: Difficult position.
On Wednesday (July, 1), Air Mauritius will restart operations. The airline will again operate regular flights to the island of Rodrigues. It will still take a while until the international connections are resumed. Only in September it plans to return to destinations like Delhi, London or Cape Town.
Whether it will really come to that, however, is uncertain. Because at the beginning of the month, the insolvency administrators painted a gloomy picture of the situation of Air Mauritius. Without an early reduction in costs, the cumulative losses would add up to nine billion Mauritius rupees or 211 million euros by March 2021. The possibility of liquidation is therefore becoming increasingly realistic, according to the insolvency administrators.
Under creditor protection since April
The insolvency administrators have not yet reached an agreement with the trade unions. In the background they are therefore working on a plan B. As the newspaper Le Dimanche-L’Hebdo writes, the government is apparently planning to create a new national airline. The new company will be based on the existing subsidiary Mauritius Helicopter, which has its own Air Operator Certificate (AOC).
Air Mauritius was founded in 1967. It owns a fleet of 13 aircraft, in addition to three ATR 72, two Airbus A319, one A330, two A330 Neo, two A340 and also two A350. With these aircraft, it serves 22 destinations on four continents. Most recently, it counted around 1.7 million passengers per year. At the end of April Air Mauritius was declared insolvent and placed under creditor protection.