[johnnymonster]

It's a temporary layoff and it's exactly what they should be doing. When they lay off the employees, they are able to collect unemployment benefits from the government. It's a perfect strategy so that the employees will be ok instead of not receiving wages. once things rebound, they can hire them back again and all is good.

[marvin]

While I agree with your point in general, Norwegian is done. They've got a heavy debt burden that's due soon. They will either go bankrupt and be restructured, or have to do a wipeout-level stock offering (unlikely in the current risk climate).

[axlee]

Can't Norway bail them out? It's not like they lack the capital, and they're the country largest airline.

[marvin]

Let's see what happens. But Norwegian privately owned, so if the state does bail them out, I sure as hell hope they wipe out the common shareholders in the process. This culture of moral hazard, "privatize the profit, nationalize the risk", is pure bullshit.

I probably agree with providing liquidity in the form of some sort of short-term loan in order to live through a completely unexpected macro crisis, if it's done on equal terms to everyone. But Norwegian won't survive that either, I think.

[ShinTakuya]

Yes, this! I wouldn't be happy as a shareholder if this happened but if the last resort for a company is a government bailout the government should own the company and benefit from the recovery.

[ucarion]

This is not to contradict what you're saying, but it should be clarified that Norway's flag carrier is Scandinavian Airlines, not Norwegian Air:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines

Again: I'm aware that you haven't said anything to the contrary. But it's useful context.

[michaeljohansen]

Well. We Norwegians joke that SAS stands for "svensk alt sammen" (Swedish all together). Some of us consider Norwegian Air Shuttle to be more of a Norwegian airline.

And yes, a bailout is likely. The govt will likely help keep Norwegian Air's planes flying during the Coronavirus period. Additional help is possible.

[hnarn]

Looking only at state ownership, the Swedish and Danish governments own about the same share of SAS (~14%) and 1/3rd of the company stock is privately owned.[1]

[1]: https://www.sasgroup.net/annualreports/2018/assets/pdf/eng/S...

[Jhsto]

Meanwhile, the Finnish government owns 55.8% of Finnair.

[gerikson]

SAS is furloughing 10K employees.

[reaperducer]

Can't Norway bail them out? It's not like they lack the capital, and they're the country largest airline.

Italy just did so for Alitalia.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-alitalia-idUSKBN212...

[brianbreslin]

I think they are norwegian in name only. Their headquarters is london.

[nkristoffersen]

Wikipedia states the headquarters is in Fornebu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Air_Shuttle

[marcosdumay]

Why would a country ever bail out a private company? (Except for corruption of course.)

They can always estatise it, but I don't imagine an airliner is strategic enough for that.

[oat_bravo_nap]

Relevant portion from article:

> Having lost money each year from 2017 to 2019 and raised cash from shareholders on three occasions, the company’s debts and liabilities had grown to 82 billion Norwegian crowns ($7.9 billion) by the end of last year.

[chatmasta]

If that’s true, it’s too bad. Norwegian is my favorite airline for trans-Atlantic flights because of great service and reasonable prices.

[mceachen]

Their stock has been hit hard since Feb (trading at 42) to currently trading at 7.

[marvin]

They're down from an all-time high of 200, so they're considered pretty much toast.

[dirtydroog]

Yup, Norwegian Air is about to go bust.

[nostromo]

Airlines have large fixed costs and debt to pay. They will not bounce back quickly, or at all. That's why they're asking for a bailout.

[hogFeast]

They don't.

Some have debt, most of the ones where I am do not though. You have depreciation, which is non-cash. Even staff costs have a variable component based on hours flown, although (where I am) they still have to pay a base salary.

(Btw, just generally...most airlines are run very efficiently. They are huge enterprises deploying these big expensive assets, and they run with very little capital. Obviously, this does vary by strategy but the low-cost airlines usually turn their capital more than once...just looking at $LUV...134m passengers, 747 planes, $22bn revenue on invested capital of $10-12bn...just based on a quick calc)

Unsurprisingly, if you are an airline company and you stop running flights then you don't have many costs.

The issue airlines have is labour law. I think we will see countries like the Nordics manage this better (SAS appears to have been able to furlough 90% of their staff) because it is easier to lay off staff temporarily (I believe this is in sector-wide bargaining agreements). In the UK, as a counter-example, it is much harder because there are no sector-wide agreements so temporary lay-off needs to be in your contract. Maybe airlines have this, I don't know but it seems like some don't see what the option is between bailout to pay staff their base salary or layoffs (and btw, airlines could just sack everyone which would end up being massively costly to the rest of us). We aren't bailing out the airlines, we are bailing out the staff.

[CydeWeys]

Especially the budget carriers, which tend to lease (not own) their planes. They are gonna be hemorrhaging an unfathomable amount of money if they can't get a several month pause on lease payments on their planes.

[gsnedders]

To be fair, the leasing companies may well be more inclined to give them a pause on their payments now than normal. If they repossess the aircraft for lack of payments, what other customers do they have for them in the short term?

[godzillabrennus]

None but they can sell them to another group of PE and recoup the Capital their investors are probably clamoring to reclaim in light of the industries issues.

Their LP’s would probably take a hit to unlock the cash and get into something more likely to rebound faster.

[Tuna-Fish]

Norwegian and it's subsidiaries currently operate a fleet consisting mostly of 737-800, which were being upgraded to 737 MAX 8, with 3 delivered so far. Some subsidiaries have a few 787's, and they did have 30 A321LR on order.

The 787's and the A321LRs are good planes that they could sell, but the 737-800 is an obsolete plane which has a very hard time operating with a profit when competing against the new crop of fuel-efficient narrow bodies. You can't really sell them to anyone for any reasonable amount in the current market. MAX 8's are also hard to get rid off, but for a different reason.

[toomuchtodo]

737-800s will go to the boneyard.

[HenryBemis]

Selling won't work. If suddenly "many" airlines start selling, the demand won't be that high, and 1) the prices will plummet and 2) there won't be enough buyers so some airlines will be severely damaged (anyway)(better fewer than all I guess).

[pbhjpbhj]

Rental relief has to work its way through the whole system, if anyone reneges on it they can bring the whole thing down. The lease company leasing aeroplanes to the airlines might have buildings they lease, hangars maybe. Suppose they spend lots of money re-possessing _all_ their aeroplanes because of non-payment (no one travelling). What now? They have no income from rental (and a heavy delay on people setting up new airlines to cover routes that have no people able to use them yet), they've spent heavily to re-possess, and now they also can't pay their own overheads. So, they too will go out of business, surely.

Then the company they got loans from has a repayment deficit, they can repossess the leasing companies assets, and pay to store them, and try to sell them ... but they're going to be getting pennies-on-the-dollar (who wants to pay to store aeroplanes they can't fly for profit?). Duplicate that over the other loans they called in in other industries; now they're burning cash as well??

If the top of the tree, the banks or capitalists, can hold out then they stand to make a tidy packet when markets rebuoy but even then there'll be a huge lag if they laid off multiple tiers of companies.

Either we all have to agree not to force each other to close down, or we all do each other over. It's not pretty.

I'm wondering what happened in 1918 with "Spanish Flu", people instigated social distancing then - closing down schools and churches - so presumably there were businesses too that couldn't pay their rents? I imagine things were less severe because more businesses would own their resources, and would be part of communities that would collapse if they called in what they were owed.

[CydeWeys]

Hopefully that's what ends up happening.

[ken]

Isn’t that true of almost every business? Unless you’re all-remote and have only gig workers, you have to pay for the rent and upkeep of your facilities and resources.

[missedthecue]

Airlines are particularly capital intensive

[pbhjpbhj]

So they're the extreme, but the general point stands, no?

[oh_sigh]

What does a world with non bounced back airlines look like? No flights? Cheap flights? Expensive flights?

[thorwasdfasdf]

Worst case scenario: several airliners go out of business. the remaining ones get a bailout from the gov. 1 to 2 years later, these few carriers will have a massive monopoly and incredible pricing power. Flights costs for consumers will go up and up and up every single year like clockwork, not all at once. But gradually, little by little they will become increasingly profitable like we've never seen before (because in the past we always had competition, that's what keeps prices low). Without competition, flight costs can continue to rise to really high levels.

The most important thing in a market economy (aka economies that are not communist), is competition. Competition is the primary thing that keeps costs low. Without it, we (consumers) are all toast - however it'd be great for the stocks of those few remaining airlines (with enormous upside potential). Flying in airplanes is a mostly ineclastic good. this means, people can't just stop flying. All this is extremely bullish for the remaining airlines, in the long run (2 years+).

[dublinben]

>Flying in airplanes is a mostly ineclastic good.

The last couple weeks have shown this to be quite untrue.

[thorwasdfasdf]

That's a short term dip. People may be able to stop flying for a few weeks or months. but, all those businesses will still need people to move around the globe. then again, maybe this will prove to the world how unnecessary all those flights were to begin with.

[jfk13]

According to some figures I found with an extremely cursory search, leisure flights account for over half of air travel. So even before we start asking how many business meetings and conferences really require physical presence, there's a vast amount of personal air travel that is largely optional.

If this pandemic leads people to realise that so much flying really isn't necessary, and actually changes long-term behavior, that could be at least one silver lining.

[TravelPiglet]

Depending on if those businesses are still around in 6 months.

[hilbertseries]

If the airline profits are incredibly high then someone with a large amount of capital will start their own airline to compete.

[MikeTheGreat]

Starting a brand-new business to compete with an established monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly that's capital intensive doesn't seem like a thing that's likely to happen.

If people decided to enter markets purely based on profits then shouldn't there be a bunch of competitors for Google's search engine biz?

[oat_bravo_nap]

Well if what people are predicting will happen, then there will be a lot of bankrupt airlines that will have planes being auctioned off.

As to your second part, search engines aren't a high profit business; advertising is.

[macrolime]

You do realize that there are lots of low cost carriers that were started to compete with the expensive incumbent airlines?

[lutorm]

There will be lots of cheap planes to buy if you want to start competing though.

[core-questions]

It depends how essential flights are deemed to be. If people want them and a market exists, fares will be very expensive at first and then eventually normalize as demand increases and capacity scales back up.

Since all of the infrastructure already exists it shouldn't take that long to scale back up.

[tonyedgecombe]

I would assume a small percentage of people would stick to their new habits but the majority will go back to their old ways when it's over.

[dominotw]

Why is this downvoted. bunch of my friends are already trolling for cheap flights.

[pbhjpbhj]

Have they run out of shit to rub on door handles, y'know they're looking to get Asshole Of The Year by doing the least societally responsible things possible.

Sorry to be crude, but it beggars belief that people can afford flights, realise why they're discounted, and yet be so short sighted.

[dominotw]

counting on lockdown to be over in future point when they fly. Worst case they lose( or get a refund) if the lockdown is still on.

[kshacker]

I do not know about that but hopefully they realize they can not pack passengers any more for the fear or spreading disease and move back at least to how seating used to be a couple of decades back ... more space rather than less.

[kristofferR]

The centimeters we're speaking of has no effect at all at how quickly disease spreads, the way the air circulates is more important than your leg room.

Seating like we used to have a few decades back is available. It costs about the same as it used to. People seem to forget how expensive air travel were back in the days, no wonder it was more luxurious.

[Normal_gaussian]

I haven't seen anywhere suggesting that the transmission vectors between passengers are a major cause of the growth into a pandemic - even if that was the case, I doubt a once in 50 year disease is cause for them to change to a less profitable seating setup the other 49.

[londons_explore]

There are lots of cases of diseases spreading from one plane passenger to another.

That's part of the reason the airline requires you to sit in allocated seats - so they can notify the people sitting in neighbouring seats if you have a notifiable disease.

My personal hypothesis is the low pressure ultra-low humidity air in planes dries out mucus membranes in the nose and throat making it more likely for airborne things to get in.

[anovikov]

But ok, they just go bankrupt right? Leasing companies repossess their planes, and that's it. Then new legal entities are established and planes are leased back to them, and they are debt free.

It's not like anyone is going to scrap the planes, or shoot the pilots.

[angry_octet]

Yes, investors have to accept the loss, not the govt. A new budget carrier will arise in a few months, buy any IP they need from the liquidators for a small fee, and re-hire 50% of the old staff straight away.

Provided COVID-19 doesn't get going again next winter.

[anovikov]

What happens if they do not "accept" the loss? It will just happen to them. They will lose cash, that's it.

[kmonsen]

When the stock get wiped out anyone holding the stock will loose their money. Those people are called investors and will loose anything they invested. They do not have a choice. They bought a stock for something, and now it is worth 0 and will never be worth anything ever again.

There are of course other options in restructuring etc, but investors can always face the possibility of loosing all the money they have invested.

[anovikov]

That's exactly what i said. Some guys will just lose their money. It no way means that airlines that went bankrupt will be physically destroyed: no one will scrap the planes or machine-gun the pilots. They will all be flying again the day the demand rebounds and COVID restrictions lifted, just under new legal entities.

[frank2]

I am pretty sure COVID will strike again next winter.

[pbhjpbhj]

I'd say "will still be active". Look at MERS, SARS, H1N1, ..., active for much longer than I'd imagined; AFAICT in those cases the crises left the news long before they stopped being a widescale medical issue that needed special interventions.

MERS peaked in 2014 (and 2015, 2016, ...), but there are still cases.

[waffle_ss]

Furlough would've been a more accurate word.

[SilasX]

IIRC, "layoff" originally meant the same thing as "furlough" until it became a euphemism for "terminated due to failing business" or just "terminated".

[selimthegrim]

It still can

[capableweb]

I always thought furlough was an US-specific thing, Norwegian Air is based in Norway.

[lmilcin]

I can't see how going on unemployment is "perfect strategy". Perfect for whom, exactly?

[mihaaly]

Some countries pay next to nothing unemployment benefits (e.g. UK) and must be seeking a new job for being eligible. Still, this is what they are forced to do anyway.

[pi-rat]

Norway pays 20 days of full salary, then 62.5% for up to 2 year (maxed at $60000/yr).

I don't know how many of their employees are Norwegian though..

[no_wizard]

* In progressive (semi socialist?) western countries

Don't forget that asterisk. USA unemployment benefits (even in liberal states, like California) are just truly awful. Losing my job "temporarily" for 2 months would cut my income drastically with no recourse (other than finding other employment), and say goodbye to affordable medical care (COBRA costs are outrageous)

This is why we need social safety nets people! I pay 47% of my income to the government and I am 100% fine with raising taxes to pay for Medicare For All and a real social safety net.

[curiousllama]

Where do you live that has a 47% effective tax rate? Maybe if you make $1M in San Francisco and have a bad accountant, but short of that...

[no_wizard]

I think this misses the forest for the trees to the overall point I’m making: we need better social safety nets, and I for one am okay paying even more for that

[thorwasdfasdf]

maybe, if you didnn't pay 47% of your income to the government, you'd have savings.

[no_wizard]

I have savings, wasn’t my point, my point was that a lot of people aren’t as fortunate and choosing between having money to live (like basic needs live) and doing the right thing in a scenario like this shouldn’t be dependent on an employer per se