Name: How Airlines Can Survive the Pandemic | WSJ
Uploaded: 2020-08-05T02:49:12.000Z
Duration: 6 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

it's the jumbo jet that made long distance travel

more affordable and was the crown jewel of BOAC fleet.

A company you may now know as British Airways.

- [Announcer] By the end of the year BOAC will have extended

- [Narrator] But in 2020, after five decades,

BA has decided to bring forward its plans to retire the 747

as have other airlines like Qantas and Virgin Atlantic.

It's a visible sign of how airlines are having to quickly

transform themselves to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

- [Narrator] Passenger volumes dropped an unprecedented 9500:00:42,080 --> 00:00:46,519 in April, and the industry is set to lose $84 billion

- It's a little bit like the game of survivor.

We don't know how long the downturn is gonna last.

A first critical choice is whether or not to keep flying,

and where to send those planes when demand is so low,

flying too many planes means losing money,

but flying too few means missing out on passenger demand

- Getting that balance right, is absolutely crucial.

but not fly unnecessary journeys with empty aircraft?

So many airlines, that's the great dilemma.

are going about it in very different ways.

we're gonna take as many people as we can,

There are some people who need to travel.

There are some people who wanna travel, so let's get them,

it's going to have the number of planes it's bringing back,

leaving its capacity around a 1/4 of what it was last year.

It certainly reduces your, your daily operating costs.

if you only have enough passengers for one or two flights

a day, you only wanna be flying one or two flights a day.

And airlines can't even rely on their usual forecast data.

As few customers are planning travel ahead of time.

- They've lost all of their historic data

how far in advance, and how much they're prepared to pay.

- [Narrator] That makes another crucial decision

particularly pressing, whether or not to keep their staff.

- If you're talking about 50% of the world's fleet,

being grounded at this moment in time and 50% of the world's

capacity not flying at this moment in time,

I mean, that probably means 50 of people employed

are not gonna be required certainly through the winter

- [Narrator] While carriers like Cathay Pacific

others like Emirates have laid off staff.

In the US airlines that accepted government money

under the cares act promised not to lay off,

or furlough workers until the end of September,

They're asking for forgiveness voluntary leaves,

working fewer hours than what's guaranteed

- [Narrator] American has worn 25,000 of its staff

that their jobs are at risk once funding expires.

And United said, it's exploring shedding 36,000 employees,

and you don't wanna create training cycles

There are only so many hours in the flight simulators.

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How Airlines Can Survive the Pandemic | WSJ

crucial

pandemic

reveal

guarantee