Aircraft industry faces shrinking by a quarter with 25,000 jobs lost

Plane-makers will have to slash production further, putting tens of thousands more UK aerospace jobs at risk as the economic turmoil caused by coronavirus intensifies. Trade body ADS is bracing for up to 25,000 aerospace jobs to go – almost a quarter of the total across the sector – because of the collapse in air travel resulting from Covid-19. Last week, Rolls-Royce announced that 9,000 of its 52,000 jobs worldwide are to be axed, with the cuts falling particularly hard in Britain. Both Airbus and Boeing have already reduced the number of airliners they build by about a third. The US company has already said it will shed 16,000 staff – 10% of its workforce – while Airbus is understood to be preparing for “savage” reductions in staff numbers. Demand for new aircraft has collapsed. Airlines have delayed orders of new planes or cancelled them altogether. Agency Partners, the analyst firm, warned that Airbus, which had been producing far more airliners than Boeing whose bestselling 737 Max was grounded, had “clearly not made deep enough cuts”. The research house predicted a further reduction in output at the European plane-maker, taking output to about a third of pre-coronavirus levels. Analyst Nick Cunningham added: “Both Airbus and Boeing are being massively optimistic about demand. In two years’ time, we might get back to 75% of where demand was before Covid, meaning the global fleet is a quarter too large. We’re going to see very few deliveries of new airliners over the next few years.”<br/>