Taxes on air travel are threatening the future of Germany's aviation sector, the president of the German Aviation Association has warned.

Jens Bischof said a 25-percent increase in aviation tax imposed on the industry on May 1 has added between 16 euros ($17.30) and 71 euros to the cost of a ticket. And he said the newly-hiked tax, alongside other taxes in the form of security levies, air traffic control fees, and more are making flying increasingly unattractive for travelers and uneconomical for airlines.

"Flying has to remain affordable," Bischof told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. "The air transport tax must be abolished. Sweden has shown the way."

His comments followed a call by Ryanair Chief Executive Eddie Wilson for a rollback in the tax, after Ryanair cited high costs as the reason why it was eliminating 22 routes from German airports for the summer of 2025.

Wilson said Germany has the highest state taxes and fees in Europe.

The German news agency DPA said many airlines are especially frustrated that the aviation tax, which was introduced as a climate-saving measure, is now being spent on things that are unrelated to the fight against global warming.

However, supporters of the tax say air travel accounts for around 2.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and is the most polluting form of travel, in terms of emissions, so it must be strongly discouraged.

Bischof, who is also CEO of Lufthansa's subsidiary Eurowings, said the taxes mean domestic flights in Germany are increasingly unviable.

Eurowings announced this month it was cutting more than 1,000 domestic flights to and from the German city of Hamburg during 2025, and that it would drop six international flights.

The carrier said in a statement that "flying to and from Germany is becoming increasingly expensive and unprofitable on many routes" and that it had no choice other than to drop the routes.

Condor, a German leisure airline, has also recently announced dropped flights, saying it will slash routes in and out of Hamburg by 13 percent.

"We are not only cutting capacity in Hamburg, but also our planned growth in summer 2025, a logical consequence of the threat of a completely disproportionate increase in charges in Hamburg," Xinhua news agency quoted Condor CEO Peter Gerber as saying.

Lufthansa, Germany's flag carrier, said recently a medium-haul A320 aircraft must pay around 4,000 euros in charges when flying in Germany.

It said the same sort of flight would have to pay around 600 euros to visit airports in Spain.

Carsten Spohr, the CEO of Lufthansa, was quoted by German media earlier this month as saying: "The extreme increase in government-imposed costs on air transport is leading to a further reduction in supply. More and more airlines are avoiding German airports or canceling important connections."