FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Airlines will have to pay up to 26 euros ($33.04) per passenger under the German government's plan to impose an air travel tax to raise one billion euros a year, according to a draft law seen by Reuters yesterday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month announced the tax plan as part of 80 billion euros of budget measures, stunning the aviation industry and sparking protests from airlines and lobby groups.

German airlines and lobby groups protested the planned tax, which they said would lead to jobs and passengers moving abroad.

"The Dutch example showed us that an air travel tax that is introduced on a national level leads mostly to a shift of passengers abroad," Ralf Teckentrupp, the president of German airline association BDF, said in a speech in Berlin.

The Dutch government scrapped its air travel tax last year after passenger numbers in the country dropped dramatically. European airlines are struggling to return to profit after the industry's worst downturn in decades.

BDF said it expected 10,000 jobs to shift abroad and German passenger volume to drop by five million per year due to the tax. In 2009, there were 182 million passengers in Germany.

Under the government's plan, airlines are to be taxed according to the distance their passengers travel, starting on January 1, 2011. For shorter trips, within the European Union and other countries less then 2,500 km away, the tax is set at 13 euros. For longer trips it would be 26 euros.

A spokesman for German flagship carrier Lufthansa said the higher tax on long haul flight could result in more passengers choosing to depart from airports outside Germany. "It is incomprehensible to us that the burden on long haul is double that of short haul since long haul can almost entirely be substituted with foreign airports," the spokesman said.

The draft law showed that the air travel tax would be lowered from 2012, when airlines will have to start buying certificates as part of a European emissions trading scheme.

Before details of the tax emerged, analysts had estimated the burden on Lufthansa could total about 200 million euros per year, more than for any other airline, assuming it could pass on about half of the tax to passengers by raising prices.