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Air France-KLM offered its French pilots and staff a 4% raise, a union source said Monday, in a bid to end a pay standoff that has resulted in damaging strikes and the departure earlier this year of the group's last CE. During a meeting with unions Saturday, new CE Ben Smith proposed a 2% raise retroactively applied from the start of the year, plus another 2% next January, the union official said. Unions may respond as soon as Tuesday to the proposal, which would include a further pay review in Oct 2019, he added. The SNPL pilots' union and others had been demanding a 5.1% pay hike to compensate for inflation that had eroded real pay levels in recent years. Air France declined to comment on the offer. "These were discussions with social partners and not negotiations," the company said. <br/>

Air France KLM reported Monday a rise in passenger traffic in September, with the airline aiming to improve its business performance after strikes earlier this year cost it millions of euros and led to a management shake-up. Air France KLM said it carried a total of 9.1m passengers last month across the group's various airline brands, up 2.7% from a year ago. It added that its load factor had increased by 0.2 percentage points to 88.6%. Benjamin Smith took over as new group CE last month. Smith faces the unenviable task of having to overcome union resistance to shrink the French unit's swollen cost base while keeping increasingly frustrated Dutch staff on side. Strikes earlier this spring cost the group some E350m and led to the departure of Smith's predecessor, while Air France KLM shares have fallen nearly 40% so far in 2018. <br/>