JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said Wednesday that the US airline industry needs additional government aid, warning it may face “a day of reckoning” as the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage travel demand. “As we get to the end of the first CARES Act period, through to September, we’re still going to be at a fraction of our normal levels. And so airlines are going to have to reset,” Hayes said. “It has the potential to cause a significant amount of job losses in the industry and an extension of the CARES Act for the industry would prevent that,” he said. Hayes’ comments Wednesday come days after a majority of lawmakers in the House of Representatives signaled their support for a six-month extension of federal aid to the airline industry. Negotiations are continuing on Capitol Hill over the shape and size of the next coronavirus relief package. Congress appropriated about $32b in federal payroll aid for the US airline industry as part of the $2.2t CARES Act passed in March. As a condition of the assistance, airlines were prohibited from laying off or reducing the pay rates of employees through the end of September. <br/>
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Wizz Air is shrugging off early signs of a new clampdown on international air travel, promising to expand its fleet by 50% over the next three years as rivals retrench. Announcing a pre-tax loss of E107.4m in the first three months during the aviation industry’s worst-ever downturn, Jozsef Varadi, CE of the Hungarian carrier, said he expected a “rollercoaster” of measures across Europe as governments struggled to contain new coronavirus outbreaks after lockdowns were eased. Varadi, who in June sharply criticised the UK’s initial quarantine on travellers from coronavirus hotspots, said the situation was “very fluid . . . Measures are getting tightened up depending on the situation. But this is not only in one direction. It will be more like a rollercoaster and you will see countries and markets going up and down again.” Wizz’s pre-tax loss compared with a profit of E75.5m last time. Despite the volatile situation, Wizz expected to continue flying 65% to 70% of its flights over the rest of the year, with an average load factor — a measure of how full the aircraft are — of roughly the same level. The group had flown on average 11.5% of its capacity in Q1, but this had risen to 70% by the end of June, well above the industry average of 40%, he said. <br/>
IndiGo, India’s biggest airline, warned capacity will slump by 60% in the three months ending Sept. 30, , as the coronavirus pandemic continues to slam the global aviation industry. The airline, operated by InterGlobe Aviation Ltd., said “the aviation industry is going through a crisis of survival.” IndiGo had a total cash balance of 184.5b rupees as of June 30, and total debt of 235.5b rupees, it said in a statement to stock exchanges Wednesday. Indigo expects Q2 available seat kilometers to be at about 40% of year ago period. IndiGo in the process of raising an additional 20b rupees by selling-and leasing-back assets, CFO Aditya Pande said in analyst call. Employee costs for the year ending March 31, 2021 is expected to be 30% lower than pre-Covid levels, Pande said. The airline will return more older planes to lessors this year, compared with new deliveries, COO Wolfgang Prock-Schauer said in the call. IndiGo lost 28.5b rupees ($380m) in the three months through June, compared with a net profit of 12.03b rupees in the same period a year earlier. IndiGo posted a loss of 8.7b rupees in the three months through March 2020, its Q4.<br/>
Indian budget carrier SpiceJet posted a quarterly loss that was wider than consensus as the coronavirus pandemic hit the industry, even after it booked an income based on expected compensation from Boeing Co. for grounded 737 Max jets. The carrier, one of the top buyers of the jets, expects the plane to return to service in the first quarter of 2021. SpiceJet posted a loss of 8b rupees ($106m) in the three months through March, compared with a profit of 562.9m rupees in the same period a year earlier. That included other income of 1.3b rupees related to costs incurred during Boeing 737 Max grounding. Bloomberg consensus was for a loss of 6.79b rupees. The airline has yet to report results for the quarter ending June 30. That is likely to be an even tougher period as the coronavirus took hold in India, prompting the government to suspend all flights for most of April and May. It has since allowed only limited flights with a cap on airfares.<br/>
Aer Lingus is to receive almost E30m from the Health Service Executive for the transport of vital supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) to Ireland from China since March in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The airline operated a PPE airbridge for 14 weeks from March 29th to June 26th between Dublin and Beijing where 259 rotations between the two cities represented the largest cargo operation by air in the history of the State. According to the HSE, Aer Lingus operated up to five flights a day over the 14 weeks and in total flew 4.75m km and transported 35,000 cubic metres or 4,000 tonnes comprising more than 86 million pieces of PPE. Records show Aer Lingus has lodged invoices totalling E30.3m to the HSE for the 259 flights. The invoices show the E30.3m includes Russian over-flight charges made to Aer Lingus of E641,814 for the use of Russian airspace during the trips.<br/>