Story ID: Alert WiJet France
WiJet Closes French Subsidiary
By: Ian Sheppard
Caption: Charter broker has pulled out of France having pulled out of the UK last year, and will now operate from Luxembourg.
Word Count: 507
WiJet, which wound down its UK operations last year and switched to an all-HondaJet fleet, has now closed its French subsidiary, based at Paris Le Bourget, saying it will restart operations in January out of Luxembourg. WiJet confirmed the closedown after Private Jet Comparisons reported on Tuesday that it was no longer accepting bookings for flights.

Its French subsidiary had been operating under the French equivalent of bankruptcy protection (with court-appointed supervision) after it made arrangements to restructure its debts earlier this year.

The company’s HondaJets, of which it received the first of 16 in March, are flown by Flying Group under a Luxembourg AOC (issued by EASA on Oct. 22, 2014), but they had been available on an arrangement with Air France-KLM called La Première. It is not clear whether this relationship will continue.

WiJet marketing manager Sarah Djeradi told AIN, “The French entity is being shut down as the group has its AOC and fleet in Luxembourg. Bookings are suspended until January 11, 2020, as lease titles are being assigned under our new fleet acquisition covenants.” She suggested the reason for the closure was that its business had “grown in Luxembourg and Belgium with our AOC partners. Over the last months, we have had an extremely strong demand for our service on HondaJets and we are looking forward to resuming flights in January 2020." Djeradi has not yet responded to AIN's specific questions about the future of the Air France-KLM contract.

The company said operations will continue but doesn’t specify if these include those for the airline. However, WiJet’s website still stated as of December 17: "As the exclusive partner of Air France for all business aviation requests, Wijet offers Air France’s first-class passengers the opportunity to seamlessly connect between Paris CDG and the 1,200 European airports on our jets."

The MoU for 16 HondaJets was signed at the Singapore Airshow in February 2018—WiJet replacing the fleet of 15 Cessna Citation Mustangs it operated previously. WiJet signed an agreement with Jet Aviation in May for FBO services around the U.S. company’s European network. At that time, WiJet had three HondaJets at Le Bourget. Honda Aircraft declined to reveal how many had been delivered to Wijet thus far.

WiJet was created in 2008 and acquired UK-based Blink in late September 2016. Its stated aim was to have an air-taxi fleet of 45 aircraft within three years. It cited Brexit as the main reason it was leaving the UK, given that less than 10 percent of its flights were in the UK, but also said Blink was poorly set up and managed and had never been profitable.

Despite closing down in the UK and now France, WiJet executives have repeatedly underlined that it is a wider group based in Luxembourg, and it would keep its continental European operations going. Co-founder and CEO Jean François Hochenauer said it was moving to a model like U.S. company Wheels Up, whose operations are undertaken by Farnborough, UK-based Gama Aviation.