Airlines are making money selling everything but tickets

With hopes that their season in hell could be approaching an end, airline stocks are on a tear. Shares in Singapore Airlines jumped the most in 21 years Tuesday while those in Cathay Pacific Airways were up the most since 2008 after Singapore and Hong Kong announced the opening of a travel bubble starting Nov. 22. News of successful trials of a Pfizer and BioNTech coronavirus vaccine pushed the Bloomberg World Airlines Index up 9.7% Monday in anticipation of an ebbing tide of pandemic. The cavalry better come quickly. Right now, much of the industry is running short of rations. With traffic down 73% from a year earlier in September — and international flights running at just 12% of their levels a year ago — the usual path for companies to bring in cash by eking out a margin on their revenue is still blocked. That could remain the case well into next year, given the likely bottlenecks to producing and distributing vaccines in quantities sufficient to reopen international travel. Still, there’s more than one way to provision your army. If you can’t sell plane tickets, you can still try everything else that’s not nailed down. The first thing companies try to sell in a crisis are bits of paper. Airlines have issued $88b in bonds so far in 2020, more than half of the $153b that the industry sold over the previous four decades put together. Throw in the value of loans taken out and airlines’ total debt is up by $124b since the end of February, the data show. It’s a similar picture on the equity side. Story has details.<br/>