Air France KLM has continued to make losses in the first quarter of 2017 with a net loss of €216 million ($235.8 million) for the group.

The loss is up 39.4 per cent on the negative result of €155 million during the same period of 2016 despite revenue increasing 1.9 per cent to €5.7 billion.

Both airlines struggled during the period, with Air France’s operating loss increasing to €123 million compared to €86 million the previous year, and a €17 million loss at KLM compared to €7 million in 2016.

The group says: “The operating result was notably impacted by currency effects, which had a negative impact of 72 million euros. Adjusted for the interest portion of operating leases, the operating margin was -0.8% versus -0.2% at 31 March 2016. EBITDA amounted to 269 million euros, stable compared to previous year.”

Cargo revenue was down 4.7 per cent to €504 million and tonnage by 1.3 per cent to 272,000 tonnes.

There was some good news from the cargo division, with revenue tonne kilometres up 0.5 per cent to two billion, while capacity was down 1.1 per cent to 3.4 billion available tonne kilometres, pushing load factors up one percentage point to 60.2 per cent.

It says: “During the quarter, the capacity measured in ATK was reduced by 1.1% in which full-freighter capacity was reduced by 14.8%.”

“Due to the small increase in traffic (RTK) of 0.5%, the load factor increased month-by-month leading to a 1.0 point increase during the quarter. The unit revenue decrease was limited to 4.9% at constant currency.”