Japan Airlines Monday said it suffered a deep quarterly net loss of $885m as the coronavirus pandemic halted air travel around the world. The air carrier said its net loss for April-June came to 93.7b yen, plummeting from a quarterly profit of 12.9b yen seen a year ago. The company changed its accounting method starting this quarter. But the latest data registered as the biggest loss, under a different accounting method, since the company was relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2012, after it filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Quarterly sales dived 78.1% to 76.4b yen, JAL said. The company did not issue annual forecasts, citing deep uncertainty surrounding the pandemic. "The worldwide spread of COVID-19 infection has imposed severe restrictions on international travel globally, causing international passenger demand to almost disappear," the company said. It added that passenger traffic for its international segment collapsed 98.6% on-year, while domestic passenger traffic fell 86.7%.<br/>
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BA has been accused of “industrial thuggery” by Len McCluskey, general secretary of the Unite union. Unite represents many of the airline’s cabin crew. BA has warned that the coronavirus pandemic is forcing it to cut jobs and renegotiate terms and conditions for remaining staff. Early in the crisis, the airline said it may make up to 12,000 of the airline’s 42,000 employees redundant. On Friday, Willie Walsh, the CE of BA’s parent company, IAG, said: “It will take until at least 2023 for passenger demand to recover to 2019 levels. Each airline has taken actions to adjust their business and reduce their cost base to reflect forecast demand in their markets not just to get through this crisis but to ensure they remain competitive in a structurally changed industry”. McCluskey accused Walsh of “thuggery of the worst industrial kind”. He said: “Because most of our members are furloughed, they are in a vulnerable position and [Mr Walsh] believes he can walk all over them. No other company in the rest of the UK has adopted this type of tactic, this scorched-earth approach. For months and months we’ve been making it clear to British Airways that of course we recognise they are in deep financial difficulties. The whole of the aviation sector is, and the whole of the manufacturing sector is, and we want to sit down and discuss how we can assist them getting through this crisis.”<br/>
The estate of a Texas man who presumably died in the 2014 disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 asked the US Supreme Court last week to address “disarray” and “confusion” in the lower courts about the deference trial courts owe to US plaintiffs in forum non conveniens determinations. Thomas Wood is the executor of the estate of his deceased brother, Philip Wood, a US citizen and IBM employee who was on temporary assignment in Malaysia immediately before the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines plane he was traveling aboard. Thomas Wood filed a suit against Boeing, which designed and manufactured the vanished 777, in state court in Illinois. He also sued Malaysian Airlines in federal court. After Boeing removed the Illinois suit to federal court, both of Wood’s suits ended up in consolidated multidistrict litigation before US District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C. In 2018, Judge Jackson dismissed Wood’s claims along with those of dozens of other plaintiffs, finding that Malaysia is the proper forum for litigation over the plane’s disappearance. The trial judge acknowledged that Wood’s case against Boeing presented “perhaps the closest call,” because the suit involved a US plaintiff suing a US corporation on behalf of a dead US citizen over alleged defects in a product designed and manufactured in the US. But much of the evidence would be from Malaysia, she said, and the case would be complicated by any Boeing attempt to rope in Malaysian defendants.<br/>