A global pandemic is not an unforeseen circumstance. It’s been expected for the past 30 years or more. The only question was the timing. If they didn’t have a plan, it was irresponsible.
Every company I’ve worked for during that period has had a plan for this, except for a very short stint in retail. The company I work for now refreshes their plan every 6 months. Today was day one of non-factory employees working entirely from home. It was routine. No panic, no surprises, no confusion. Business-as-almost-usual.
So, yeah, I am going to hold them to that standard.
Cool. I think it is utterly ridiculous for them to have expected their entire industry to be shut down en-masse globally.
My employer has always had plans for its workforce to work completely remote for situations like this. My industry goes on without skipping a beat. I do not think it is as easy for something like the entire airline industry as it is for say financial services.
Again…I have what I consider to be reasonable and realistic standards. You do you.
911 didn’t shut things down globally. just domestically.
but again…sure. High standards are really high. You and anyone else can have them.
Mine are lower. I do not need to be lectured repeatedly by multiple people about this. The perspective was given once, it doesn’t need to be harped on over and over again.
I guess I’ll make it even clearer, then. Their insurance providers absolutely require them to have emergency planning and response on file. That is for operations. If they didn’t do financial planning around the same scenarios, then that’s just irresponsible. I mean, why do airline CEOs make 300x the pay of their workers if they can’t see that?
As for learning the lessons of 9/11, airlines still haven’t shut down globally. They still haven’t shut down in the US. Air cargo is still going strong. Hyperbole doesn’t suit.
Finally, as a reminder, you’re the one who responded to @davide405 saying that the industry should be propped up. If you don’t want to be responded to, don’t post.
If we require a line item list of reasonable expenditures, AND audit the use of funds, then I don’t see a problem with this.
Payroll for furloughed employees (not execs), healthcare and 401k contributions, and aircraft inspections/repairs all would be fine. Offset of course by reasonable, non-realized expenses such as fuel you didn’t need to purchase.
All sympathy for airlines must fit inside a 21 x 19 x 38 micron volume or be assessed a $50 fee. Sympathy that has a mass greater than 75 nanograms is also due a charge of $100 per item.
$50 billion is not needed to prop them up unless ALL that money goes directly into worker’s salaries. But it won’t. The airlines should be told to expect to draw down to meet vastly lowered demand and publicly give us an accounting of their payrolls, not including anyone making over $1 million a year. We’ll pay those salaries along with the rest of the workers in the country. The rich, those folks who made over 1 mill last year, can draw down on some of those vast cash reserves that the rest of us don’t enjoy. Fuck them.
True enough. That’s actually the entire point of a corporation in the first place: to shield any given individual from liability/responsibility whilst simultaneously granting them greater freedom to operate. So, in that sense, corporations can never be “people” no matter what some idiotic politician may claim.
They can have state aid if, once flights get going again, 100% of profits go to the state - not a penny to shareholders - until the aid is paid back, at a standard rate of interest.
A government implementation of an airline would be interesting, fun for the competitive airline market. probably not fun for the lobbying group mentioned in the article… if your “investors” (taxpayers) only want a lower price per ticket, for instance, this could be set up in an anti-profit model that lowers the price drastically over time. if the original airlines go bankrupt, ‘over time’ would be drastically lowered due to a huge reduction in the price of used passenger jets … if jets are owned outright by an airline flying them at cost, flight/ticket costs might be represented in per/customer per/hour (meaning as the flight fills, it gets cheaper by the hour per person).
thinking about this a little more with some research … flying a 737 with a full crew costs around 4-5 thousand per hour of flight time considering average hourly rates for flight crew, average maintenance and airport and other types of regular fees and insurances, at the upper end of that with a full flight it might end up costing $11-$12/ per flight hour per passenger. Consider that for your next (full) 700-1400 KM flight! The airlines have a massive profit margin.
How about instead of a bailout, a buyout, and we take back the skies.
One caveat of disaster preparedness in a highly capitalistic system is that it makes you weaker than your competitors in non-disaster times. Worse, if your prep involves keeping inventory on hand to weather storms it makes you a target for a leveraged buyout and asset stripping. An even bigger problem is if you do manage to make yourself recession resistant to let downturns kill off your less forward thinking competitors your entire advantage can be wiped out when said competitors get huge government bailouts in times of financial stress.
I concur. And therein is the question…I didn’t say a bailout is ok regardless of what they do with said money. I said this is the type of scenario where a bailout would be acceptable and beneficial to ensure the health of the industry. No where in that article does it state what the airlines will do with that money. Jumping to conclusions is just that.
What would a bailout look like? Where does the money go? Does it get structured a certain way? Are there specific guidelines in how the money is dispersed within their corporation?
Isn’t that what the collected baggage fees are for? (Don’t say you spent them already.)
You gripe about not being able to perform aircraft maintenance in a timely manner, here is a golden opportunity to catch up on ALL of your deferred maintenance COMPANY WIDE throughout ALL DEPARTMENTS, including the customer service, facilities, non-aircraft maintenance and IT.
Edit: Just because the crisis is over doesn’t necessarily mean we are coming back. You have to now re-earn our trust.
This is what happened in the telecom industry in the last century. OTOH, we’d still be paying twelve bucks to talk to Grandma on Christmas without deregulartion, so…
The biggest U.S. airlines spent 96% of free cash flow last decade on buying back their own shares. American Airlines Group Inc. – which is not shown in the chart but is included in overall figures – led the pack, with negative cumulative free cash flow during the decade while it repurchased more than $12.5 billion of its shares. United Airlines Holdings Inc. used 80% of its free cash flow on buybacks, while the S&P 500 Index as a whole allocated about 50% for the purpose. As the industry reels under the weight of the coronavirus outbreak corporate leaders are seeking federal assistance to ease the burden.*
I think, as a whole, the airline corporate executives didn’t consider that making their corporations resilient was much of a priority. They surely did get some wonderful bonuses from their high share prices though.
