unaligned

EasyJet has slashed its flying schedule in response to the travel curbs rippling across Europe that have deepened the aviation crisis. It also revealed a loss of about GBP400m in the final quarter of 2020 as problems pile up for the airline industry. It suffered its first annual loss since its launch in 1995 in the financial year to September. The UK-based carrier said on Thursday it expected to fly “no more” than 10% of 2019’s schedule between January and March, down from the 18% it flew between October and December. The outlook for European airlines has darkened as countries including the UK, Belgium and Sweden tighten border restrictions, raising questions over whether tourism will return for the summer season. European airlines are reliant on travel restarting for the summer season, when they earn the bulk of their revenue. Without a pick-up in time for the summer, analysts expect several carriers will be forced to raise more cash. In the UK, easyJet’s largest market, the airlines have been hit with more travel restrictions as the government introduced hotel quarantine for arrivals from high-risk countries. EasyJet’s chief executive Johan Lundgren urged the UK government not to go further and said a blanket approach to quarantining would “make no sense”. He made his plea as chief financial officer Andrew Findlay said losses in Q4 2020 were about GBP400m, although official figures have not yet been released.<br/>

Southwest’s CEO had blunt words for industry peers who have predicted that carriers will stop bleeding cash this year, saying it all comes down to the coronavirus pandemic. “The fact of the matter is, we’re not in control,” Gary Kelly said Thursday. His comments came after Delta offered a rosy outlook when it reported earnings earlier this month. Kelly’s sober outlook summed up the uncertainty over how the pandemic will affect travel in the coming weeks. Will the spring break across the US bring increased demand for leisure flights? Airline executives said they couldn’t predict. For this quarter, at least, Southwest and two other carriers that also reported results -- American Airlines and JetBlue -- don’t expect much improvement. “We just don’t know what twists and turns that this pandemic will take,” Kelly said. When Delta posted earnings two weeks ago, it said it had a “good shot” at turning a Q3 profit and stood firm that it could break even on a cash-flow basis in Q2. By contrast, Kelly and his team kept adding cautious notes in a day of interviews and at its conference call. “We’re just reluctant to make any bold predictions,” Kelly said. “At this point, we certainly have bookings out there in March, but I’m not drawing any conclusions whatsoever from them.”<br/>

JetBlue lost $1.4b in 2020, but is stressing that network and fleet shifts should position it to perform well when the air travel market recovers. Just when that might happen remains an open question, but JetBlue’s executives expect slow improvement in 2021. “We believe our initiatives will allow us to emerge with structurally better margins,” the New York City-based airline’s CE Robin Hayes says Thursday. Those initiatives include a pending partnership with American Airlines, acquisition of new aircraft like Airbus A220s and A321neos, and the expected launch of flights to London. During JetBlue’s 2020 earning, Hayes stressed that JetBlue’s London plan remains on track despite uncertainty about which airport it might serve and how it will acquire needed slots. “We are still on track for a Q3 London launch,” Hayes says, adding that JetBlue has a “path” to begin operations at “more than one” London airport. JetBlue has not yet offered those flights for sale and in a recent filing with US regulators said it was having trouble securing London slots. JetBlue’s $1.4b 2020 loss compares to a $569m profit in 2019. <br/>

Wizz Air vowed to use the coronavirus crisis to win market share from rivals including easyJet, as the no-frills airlines both posted sharp falls in quarterly revenue. As most carriers cut fleets and networks, Hungary-based Wizz has been adding new bases and aircraft, with some delayed deliveries, as it presses its competitive advantage. While Wizz is “not immune” to the travel slump in the short term, CE Jozsef Varadi said Thursday, adding “the longer it goes, the better we will emerge” in competitive terms. Quarterly results from Wizz and easyJet came just as travel recovery hopes suffer new setbacks, with governments imposing new restrictions to contain the spread of COVID-19 variants. At easyJet revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 30 fell by 88% to GBP165m, while it was down 77% to E149.9m at Wizz, which posted a similar decline in passenger numbers and a E115m net loss.<br/>

IndiGo posted another loss in Q3 of its financial year as revenues slumped by half on capacity cut 40%, though figures did mark some improvement on the previous quarter. In a stock-market announcement Thursday, the airline’s parent Interglobe Aviation disclosed a pre-tax loss of Rs6.2b ($85m) for the three months ending 31 December 2020. The loss compares to a profit before tax of Rs5.6b at the same stage last year. It represents, however, a near halving of the Rs12 billion pre-tax loss IndiGo reported for the three months between June and September 2020. Revenues were halved in its Q3 to Rs51.5b. That, though, again marked some improvement on the 65% fall in revenues IndiGo reported for its Q2. IndiGo, India's biggest carrier, saw passenger traffic down 41% on capacity cut 51% for the three months ending December 2020. Load factor for this period fell 15 percentage points to 72% and yields slipped almost 5% compared with the same period in 2019.<br/>

Hong Kong startup carrier Greater Bay Airlines is preparing a fallback plan to start with cargo services first in late summer if pandemic conditions make passenger flights infeasible. "If the situation continues to be difficult, we will look at whether we can use our aircraft to fly more cargo operations to carry vaccines," CE Algernon Yau Ying-wah said this week. "We can use the aircraft for other purposes." Greater Bay is set to take delivery of the first of three leased, secondhand Boeing 737-800 jets in mid-February, though the plane will then undergo several months' refurbishment in Guangzhou before coming to Hong Kong. The new venture is the brainchild of Shenzhen-based property tycoon Bill Wong Cho-bau, whose Donghai Airlines is based in the mainland city abutting Hong Kong. Wong, known in the mainland as Huang Chubiao, originally launched Donghai with cargo flights in 2006 before adding passenger services eight years later. Cargo has been a relative bright spot amid the Hong Kong aviation sector's dire straits. Hong Kong International Airport, previously the busiest in Asia for passenger traffic, saw its traveler count plunge 87.7% to 8.84 million last year, with many put off by pandemic worries and the city's tight quarantine controls on arriving fliers. Cargo flights, however, grew 18.3% for the year, though overall freight volumes slipped 7%.<br/>