Boeing cutting more than 12,000 U.S. jobs, thousands more planned

[aum]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Boeing Co (BA.N) said Wednesday it was eliminating more than 12,000 U.S. jobs, including involuntary layoffs of 6,770 U.S. workers as the largest American planemaker restructures in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

 

Boeing also disclosed it plans “several thousand remaining layoffs” in the next few months but did not say where those would take place.

 

The company announced in April it would cut 10% of its worldwide workforce of 160,000 by the end of 2020. Boeing said Wednesday 5,520 U.S. employees will take voluntary layoffs and leave in the coming weeks. Boeing also disclosed it is notifying 6,770 workers this week of involuntary layoffs.

 

Boeing is slashing costs as a sharp drop in airplane demand during the pandemic worsened a crisis for the company in which the 737 MAX was grounded last year after the second of two fatal crashes.

 

Chief Executive Dave Calhoun told employees in an email the “pandemic’s devastating impact on the airline industry means a deep cut in the number of commercial jets and services our customers will need over the next few years, which in turn means fewer jobs on our lines and in our offices. ... I wish there were some other way.”

 

Boeing shares rose 3.1% in late trading to $149.23.

 

CFRA analyst Colin Scarola upgraded Boeing to buy and raised his price target to $174 from $112 saying Boeing “can weather its current crises and grow over the long term.”

 

In April, Boeing recorded zero orders for the second time this year and customers canceled another 108 orders for its grounded 737 MAX plane, compounding its worst start to a year since 1962.

 

Last month, Boeing raised $25 billion in a bond offering that allowed the company to avoid taking government aid.

The job cuts include more than 9,800 employees in Washington State. Boeing said Wednesday the “several thousand remaining layoffs will come in additional tranches over the next few months.”

 

Boeing said it expects to resume 737 MAX deliveries in the third quarter following regulatory approvals, with production re-starting at low rates in the second quarter before gradually increasing to 31 per month during 2021.

 

“We’re moving forward with our plan to restart 737 MAX production in Renton, Washington,” Calhoun said in his email.

Reuters reported in April that 737 MAX approval is not expected until at least August.

 

The aerospace sector has been hard hit including many Boeing suppliers.

 

General Electric Co (GE.N) said this month it planned to cut its aviation unit’s global workforce this year by as much as 25%, or up to 13,000 jobs. SpiritAero Systems Holdings (SPR.N) announced it is cutting another 1,450 jobs in Kansas.

 

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[dufus]

it,s here  .... !

[tennis]

14 hours ago, dufus said:

it,s here  .... !

 

Indeed.  It is here.  The repercussions (to the response) to the virus are becoming more apparent daily.  Like a patient who needed hospitalization and surgery for an ailment, the patient, here, is showing signs of distress in the recovery room.  Will the patient survive the protocol to treat the condition? Absent a vaccine, who, anywhere in the world, recognizes the overall impact of the virus to the global economies?

 

On 4/29/2020 at 3:49 PM, Karlston said:

Planes Are Still Flying, but Covid-19 Recovery Will Be Tough

Air travel is down more than 90 percent from last year, and analysts say the rebound will be slower than following 9/11 or the financial crisis.

Airlines must keep serving every city in their networks, under terms of the relief bill passed by Congress.Photograph: Rob Carr/Getty Images

 

Over the past three months, Covid-19 has reduced air travel in the United States to the point where the fact of a nearly full American Airlines jet—one on which many passengers failed to wear masks—warrants international news coverage.

 

Air travel is down more than 90 percent from this time last year. Then, the TSA was prodding more than 2 million people a day through body scanners and x-ray machines. Earlier this week, the total was only 130,000—itself up from even lower depths a few weeks ago. It will be a long, slow climb back to pre-coronavirus passenger numbers. And the price for getting there could mean a significantly smaller American airline industry.

 

US carriers started 2020 on a high note, coming off a great 2019 and logging robust revenues in the opening months of the year. In early February, United forecast such a need for pilots, it bought a flight academy. On Valentine’s Day, Delta paid out a record $1.6 billion in profit to its employees. In March, the pummeling came. International travel bans and nationwide stay-at-home orders pushed US airlines to ground 2,400 aircraft, cutting half or more of their capacity. The likely result is a 70 percent year-over-year drop in revenue, according to analysts with the investment bank Cowen. Carriers are burning through between $10 and $12 billion a month, according to industry trade group Airlines for America.

 

“If they were humans, they’d be dead from hemorrhaging,” says industry consultant George Hamlin. A big part of the problem is that airlines have no easy way to stop the bleeding. Jet fuel may be cheap, but airlines can’t easily slough off costs like lease or mortgage payments for planes, rent for offices and maintenance facilities, and corporate debt payments. “It’s different and frankly scarier than anything I’ve seen,” says Hamlin, given that a Covid-19 vaccine is at least a year away, and a second wave of the virus could hit come winter. The unknown unknowns are legion.

 

The CARES Act set aside a $58 billion salve for the aviation industry, and all the big American airlines have taken loans or grants that allow them to continue paying their workers. The attached strings include limits on executive compensation, a moratorium on stock buybacks, and an agreement not to furlough or fire any employees until the end of September. But the biggest burden is likely the requirement that airlines taking federal dollars keep running flights to every city they were serving on March 1, well before most started grounding jets......

 

Source: Planes Are Still Flying, but Covid-19 Recovery Will Be Tough (Wired)

 

 

 

On 5/23/2020 at 5:37 PM, dufus said:

 

A field hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., built to deal with the coronavirus has been closed without treating a single patient. The $21 million facility was part of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s response to the growing number of coronavirus patients at New York City hospitals. That response included smaller facilities at the Billie Jean King Tennis Center and Stony Point (Long Island), and a huge, 1,100-bed medical center at the Javits Center.

 

All told, the state spent upwards of $350 million on facilities that were built but never used.

 

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