American / United Bankruptcies

The North American – Asian routes are also being hit now by SARS, so profit is down all-round. AA will restructure and pull out of this.

It is always saddening when the great old airlines are on the verge of folding, I wouldn’t have thought at one time that carriers such as UA and AA would be in this position. I don’t want to see them cease operations, even though I’ve never had any dealings with them. I have a friend who always swore by AA when she went to Florida, but other than that I don’t know anyone who’s flown with them. As Greekdude said, the USA/Pacific routes are usually busy, whichever airline flies them, but that is not usually a measure of how the airline is doing. I never went on a Sabena flight which was anything other than full, and from what I used to hear about their flights, other routes were often booked up as well, but they still ended up going. It’s invariably down to poor management at the end of the day.

The pilots voted to accept pay cuts, the ground workers also did so. The flight attendants turned the offer down. While it is not the only cause, it looks as if it could tilt American towards bankruptcy. Sad really that the unions put themselves infront of the airlines future, they would have to take bigger cuts if it entered Chapter 11 so it seems rather crazy.
If it did go bankrupt then hopefully it could come out a better airline in the end.

Mongu, I get the occassional email from UA letting me know what’s going on, since I’m a Premier Exec member. I know that they worked out deals with all their unions, and they reduced some frequencies on various routes, even canceling others. One route I couldn’t believe they canceled altogether was the LAX-AKL run. I know they codeshare with NZ on that route already, but the 3 or 4 times I flew on that route, it was always full. Last summer, it was changed from a 744 to a 777, and they discontinued the AKL-MEL portion. It was still a full flight. UA always had high load factors on their Pacific routes, and I know first hand that they do on the SYD and AKL routes. Maybe they didn’t like the fact that the aircraft would sit on the tarmac at AKL for 12 hours, arriving at 6 a.m. and not leaving till 6 p.m. An aircraft can’t make money sitting on the ground. Then again, QF pretty much has 3 744’s sitting on the tarmac @ LAX doing the same thing on a daily basis. One of them gets to go back and forth from LAX to JFK while the other 3 basque in the SoCal sunshine. As far as their website goes, I think it’s rather easy to navigate. If you want to see some potential usefull info, on one of the columns with links on the home page, is “company information.” Click on that, and you can go to press releases, among others.