What's an Airline Nightmare? No Spring Break!

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If coronavirus fears sap demand for U.S. domestic flights, the aerospace industry is in real trouble.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. became the first carrier to officially reduce its U.S. flight schedule amid an uptick in infected Americans and a wave of canceled events and business travel. The company will trim U.S. flights by 10% in April and cut international capacity by 20%, with similar reductions likely to occur in May, according to an email to employees from United CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby. “We certainly hope that these latest measures are enough, but the dynamic nature of this outbreak requires us to be nimble and flexible moving forward,” Munoz and Kirby said in the memo, as reported by Bloomberg News. In the meantime, United is offering staff an unpaid leave of absence, deferring the payout of merit-based raises and implementing a hiring freeze through June 30.

Like most major airlines, United had already suspended service to China and Hong Kong while cutting certain routes to Japan, Singapore and South Korea. But we’re now seeing a pivot away from the hot spots of the virus outbreak – many of which were under travel advisories or outright bans – toward just generally weaker interest in going anywhere near an airplane. Joel Szabat, the Transportation Department’s acting under secretary for policy, told a Senate committee Wednesday that the virus is already causing people to reconsider airline travel. Global airline passenger volumes by fell by 4.7% to 6% on the outbreak, he said, citing industry analysts. United’s domestic capacity reductions will involve a rollback in flight frequency on certain routes, capacity cuts in cities served by multiple hubs and a pivot to smaller planes in some cases. Some of the international cuts involve service to Europe and Latin America, giving a sense of just how global this new reticence toward flying has become. In Europe, Deutsche Lufthansa AG is grounding 150 of its 763 aircraft due to lower demand. It plans to cut as much as a quarter of its short- and medium-haul flights across all of its brands.