Airlines in a Crisis

Norwegian have today presented a new plan for how they dream the company can be rescued.  Lets talk about the positives first. They are planning to do a reverse share split by a factor of 100 from over 3 billion to round 30 million. There have been comments that sees shares only worth some norwegian øre (100'th of a Norwegian Krone (nkr)) as signs of a company in distress and leading to a share price easily manipulated = penny stocks. For any hope for the future they need to be able to have shares with an exchange worth of whole nkr's. Theis leads us to the question wether there are enough small investors in Norway, and maybe other Scandinavian countries with enough cash to waste to swallow up a new issue of 4 billion nkr of even more new shares whose value could be lost nearly before they are isued. After all they say straight out that they hope the shareholders will continue to support them for even further future recapitalizations. If there are that many willing to throw eve...

Norwegian came out with its plan to serve the norwegian market with norwegian package hollidays at the same day as the government opened up for travel within the Nordic countries. Only work related for now but this government have proved so wobbly when it comes to standing by its decisions that anything could happen. actually most countries governments have in this crisis proved that any reopening schedule tends to be fast forwarded as the lightest political pressure appear from all sorts of groups. This means an airline like Norwegian that have and still should serve an international market need to be planning far ahead to take advantage of all planned opening dates for borders and relaxation dates for quarantines. In addition to having contingency plans for when these move forward. As they also should have plans for if they get more restrictive again. If something is announced by any of the countries they could fly to Norwegian as an airline should within hours come up with a pla...

Hibernation is not the right path for any airline. Neither planes nor crew nor admin or financials benefits from it. They should: Start to rotate planes so all of them get an airing on a regular basis. Utilize freight opportunities so also 787's can get flight time. Start to rotate pilots so they are all ajour with license requirements and up to date on their flying skills. Negotiate with government for flexible utilization of percentage return to work schemes for all employees. Flexibly add additional later departures for those departures that fill up quickly. It is not like they don't have neither slots, planes or crew available an mass. Look for near future opportunities in other scandinavian countries where governments may not keep their travel advice for foreign travel as restrictive aw Norway. Prepare their spanish bases for Scandinavia to the sun as soon as that and other med countries opens up for summer seasonal travel. This would also placate possible lawsuits l...