Delta said it would remove Boeing 777 aircraft from its fleet by the end of the year, a sign the airline believes international travel will recover slowly from the coronavirus pandemic. Retiring the fleet will help “stop the bleeding” as the airline looks to conserve cash, CE Ed Bastian wrote in a letter to employees on Thursday. Delta is burning $50m a day, Bastian said, a rate the airline wants to reduce to zero by the end of the year. US air travel has dropped over 90% from a year ago. Airline executives have said they believe domestic travel will be first to resume, as people may feel ready to visit friends and relatives or take relatively short flights before they will venture abroad. In addition to the 777, one of its largest planes, Delta is also accelerating its retirement plan for the smaller McDonnell Douglas MD-88 and MD-90s, which will exit the fleet in June, and has parked more than 650 jets, Bastian wrote. That means Delta has more pilots than it needs. John Laughter, senior vice president of flight operations, told employees in a separate memo that the airline will likely be overstaffed by 7,000 pilots this fall.<br/>
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Korean Air Lines said Friday it will require all passengers on domestic routes to wear masks on board from next week. Korean Air has joined its global peers to adopt the rules requiring masks to stem the spread of the new coronavirus. "It is obligatory for all passengers on domestic flights to wear masks from Monday. The company is considering applying the rules to international flights as well," a company spokeswoman said.<br/>
Cathay Pacific Airways said Friday it made an unaudited loss of HK$4.5b ($580.53m) at its full-service airlines in the first four months of the year and the financial outlook remained "very bleak" due to the pandemic. Cathay said passenger numbers in April dropped by 99.6% compared to the prior year as it flew a skeleton network due to a ban on transit traffic in Hong Kong and little outbound demand. "At this stage, we still see no immediate signs of improvement," Cathay Chief Customer and Commercial Officer Ronald Lam said. "We are evaluating all aspects of our business to ensure that we remain strong and competitive when we emerge from this crisis." <br/>
Vietnam has mounted an all-out effort to save the life of its most critically ill coronavirus patient, a British pilot who works for Vietnam Airlines. Little expense has been spared to try save the life of the 43-year-old man, identified only as "Patient 91", who caught the coronavirus at a bar in the southern business hub of Ho Chi Minh City in mid-March, state media reported. More than 4,000 people connected to the cluster were tested, with 18 of them found to be infected with the coronavirus. While most have recovered, the British pilot is on life support and his condition has deteriorated significantly. On Tuesday, the health ministry held a meeting with experts from top hospitals and decided that the only way to save the man's life was a lung transplant. The patient has just 10% of his lung capacity left and has been on life support for more than 30 days, Tuoi Tre said. Deputy health minister Nguyen Truong Son told media last month that Vietnam had imported specialist medicine from overseas to treat blood clots in the patient, but to no avail. <br/>