EasyFly (Colombia) (Bogotá) has announced that it will file for insolvency to initiate restructuring, allowing it to continue operating despite the ongoing economic crisis and eventually emerge in a leaner form. The airline claimed the process would also permit it to negotiate more easily with its creditors.

The airline, whose expansion had been based on operating routes between cities without transiting via Bogotá, submitted a request to the country's Superintendency of Corporations to begin the business reorganisation.

The carrier expects to resume “normal operations” in September 2020, assuming the government does not extend the current travel restrictions, president Alfonso Ávila said in a statement to local media. EasyFly has continued to make charter flights to cover some costs, but its debt burden was too heavy to continue in its current form, he added.

“For airlines there was a sudden and total paralysis of activities, leaving the companies without revenue to cover a significant fixed cost structure. Four months of inactivity have already passed, fixed costs have continued to accumulate, and although for our part we have made efforts to generate income, through operations charter and pilot flight operations, these are still insufficient to cover these debts,” the company said in a statement posted on its website on August 5.

“If we do not quickly correct the consequences of these unforeseeable and uncontrollable circumstances for EasyFly, which have weakened our finances, we expose ourselves to the fate of the many airlines that have gone bankrupt in recent months since the onset of the coronavirus.”

Colombian law gives viable companies hit by the pandemic the possibility to restructure their debts to continue operating under sustainable conditions that guarantee their continuity.

EasyFly carried more than more than two million passengers during 2019, a growth of 64%, operating 44 routes connecting 30 cities. It operates a fleet of five ATR42-500s, eleven ATR42-600s, five ATR72-600s, and one Jetstream 41, the ch-aviation fleets module shows. Only two of the ATR42-600s are currently active.