Just days before the parliamentary election, on 30 March, Levente Magyar, the deputy foreign minister, was still praising the scheduled flights relaunching from Pécs-Pogány after an 18-year break, under the German airline operator SkyHub Airlines. It took only a few months for the company to all but collapse, and now Pécs may be left chasing its money. The scandal has caused a stir locally, although the city leadership insists it thoroughly vetted SkyHub at the time and that the failure is not its fault.
German airline operator went bankrupt quickly
At a meeting of Pécs City Council’s Legal and Procedural Committee on 22 July, members had to consider a bleak proposal. According to the document, Skyhub, which operated the Pécs–Munich scheduled service, had become insolvent, meaning not only had the route already been suspended, but there was now little prospect of recovering the funds invested by municipal institutions and companies.
Read our previous article concerning the issue – Scheduled flights return to rural Hungarian airport
According to the document signed by Deputy Mayor Csaba Ruzsa, only two months after the service launched on 30 March, the German company informed the municipality on 27 May that, because of payment difficulties, it would stop flying on all its routes from 10 June. “Skyhub requested the opening of insolvency proceedings in Germany on 2 June 2026, about which Irány Pécs Nonprofit Ltd received official notification on 9 June 2026,” it added.
The German firm owes a great deal
The route operated only 21 times between the two cities, with very low load factors, even though at the end of March the deputy foreign minister had spoken in upbeat terms about the return of scheduled services as a sign of the rural airport’s future rapid development.
Instead of a success story, however, there has been a total flop. What is more, Pécs taxpayers’ money — a total of 774,000 euros, or more than 280 million forints — was transferred to Skyhub under various titles by municipal institutions. Some of that money can no longer even be recovered; only roughly a little less than half may be claimable. The committee approved the proposal, but also decided to launch an investigation. The head of the municipally owned Irány Pécs company, a partner of the German firm, has been asked to explain why it previously regarded the rapidly failing company as a reliable partner.
On this point, the Pécs municipality said the German company had undergone an exceptionally strict due diligence process at the time. Through its press office, the city leadership said the Skyhub PAD GmbH & Co. KG company commissioned to operate the service had been subjected to extremely rigorous vetting before the contract was signed. Nor, it added, did anything point to the risk of insolvency: within a single year, the company had increased the number of its investors from 40 to 100 and was also under contract with, among others, Lufthansa’s official partner airline, the Danish Air Transport (DAT), the city told MTI.
Regional airports in trouble
The airport in Pogány, a small settlement south of Pécs, was opened in 2006. Capable of receiving small and medium-sized aircraft, typically 50- to 100-seat passenger planes, it has since been used largely for hobby flying, while Magnus Aircraft Zrt, a small-aircraft manufacturer, has operated a production base on the site since 2018.
Over its 20-year history, the airport has handled scheduled services on three occasions, but each time the carrier abandoned the route for financial reasons.
Record summer for Wizz Air: 1,200 daily flights and new rules for travellers!
Austrian Airlines operated the Pécs–Vienna route for about six months in 2006 before cancelling it because of poor load factors. The Maltese airline Universal Air carried passengers between Munich, Malta and Corfu from spring 2024 until summer 2025. Skyhub launched the Pécs–Munich service at the end of March this year. According to the proposal, the aircraft operated at an average load factor of 40.6 per cent, although from May Lufthansa’s connecting Munich services also became available from Pécs via direct booking.
Transport Minister Dávid Vitézy said at a government spokesperson’s briefing in early June that regional airports were facing an operational crisis, and that efforts were under way to find a solution.
Budapest Airport unveils huge expansion plans with new terminal, railway station and major infrastructure upgrade!
