Having filed for bankruptcy on February 5, German leisure airline Germania has shut down permanently after it failed to find any investors. The closure of the carrier which operated a fleet of 37 aircraft will now see all 1,700 employees laid off. The news will not be welcomed at Airbus either as this will result in the permanent cancelation of an order for 25 A320 neo jets which Germania sought to acquire as it set a dramatic growth strategy in an attempt to capture a major portion of the leisure market share once held by the now defunct airberlin. 2018 saw the Germania expand capacity by around 40 percent.
According to its administrator Rüdiger Wienberg, “It was clear from the beginning given the circumstances that it would be extremely difficult to rescue [the airline]. Germania was grounded, we had no owned aircraft and no money to pay for lease rates. We rolled out the red carpet for interested parties, but unfortunately no one could or wanted to walk across it.”
Germania had initially concentrated on niche markets both for leisure and ethnic travel, while also leasing out a major part of its fleet which generated substantial profits in the leasing arm. However, as leases expired Germania took on a growing number of aircraft into its own operation.
Germania Fluggesellschaft mbH, trading as Germania, began operations in 1978 and was headquartered in Berlin, eventually flying to 42 destinations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It is understood that subsidiaries Germania Flug, founded in 2014 in Switzerland to operate leisure flights under the newly established HolidayJet brand and Bulgarian Eagle, founded in 2016 in Bulgaria as an ACMI carrier with two aircraft based at London Gatwick will not be affected by Germania’s closure.
