Air France-KLM is coming under growing pressure to repay its pandemic state-aid packages quickly, as rivals including Lufthansa pounce on potential acquisitions in the aviation industry that the Franco-Dutch group will otherwise be barred from. The French state, which recapitalised the airline group last year in a deal that constrains it from making purchases, is “looking closely” at financial options along with the company, said Jean-Baptiste Djebbari, France’s junior minister for transport. “The issue [for the company] is whether it will manage, financially, to untie its hands quickly enough so that it can respond to market opportunities,” Djebbari said on Monday. The group needed to be “one of the major players” in a post-crisis world and in a possible wave of consolidation, he added, allowing it to compete with Lufthansa and other rivals such as International Airlines Group, the owner of British Airways and Iberia. Lufthansa, which has repaid its own state aid, and Swiss-Italian shipping conglomerate MSC last week expressed an interest in buying a majority stake in Italy’s state-owned ITA Airways, the successor to bankrupt Alitalia and part of the SkyTeam airline alliance along with Air France-KLM and Delta. The Franco-Dutch group has no liquidity problems and would have been a natural suitor but was constrained by its bailouts, two people familiar with the matter said. ITA’s slots at Linate airport, Milan, which feeds corresponding flights into Paris, made it particularly attractive, one of the people added.<br/>
sky
The airline that carried monkeys part of the way to a US research laboratory before they were involved in a highway crash in Pennsylvania says it will stop the shipments. Kenya Airways will not renew its contract with the shipper when it expires this month, airline CEO Allan Kilavuka said. Kilavuka did not identify the shipper who paid the airline to fly the animals from Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, to New York. The move by the African airline is the latest skirmish in a long-running battle between animal-rights groups and researchers — with airlines caught in the middle — over the use of animals in medical experiments. On Jan. 21, a truck towing a trailer with 100 monkeys collided with a dump truck on a Pennsylvania highway. Several of the monkeys escaped. Authorities said later that three were shot and killed and they accounted for the rest. The US CDC, which assisted local authorities after the crash and escape of some of the monkeys, said Tuesday that the monkeys are at an approved quarantine facility. A CDC spokeswoman declined to give the location of the facility or say what the lab intended to do with the monkeys. Cynomolgus monkeys are often used in medical research because their DNA resembles that of humans, and they have been in high demand since the beginning of the pandemic for testing vaccines. Monkeys were in short supply even before the pandemic. A 2018 report by the National Institutes of Health said half of researchers had trouble finding enough animals, which led to talk of talk of creating a “strategic monkey reserve.”<br/>