Airlines in a Crisis

So far the new Boeing CEO is not standing out as a problem solver. His first couple of months has more been a deepening of the Boeing rut. Maybe his immediate and well announced (partial) relocation to Seattle was not such a smart move after all. It certainly have given the machinists the guts to demand back stuff they gave up 10 years ago because Boeing then threatened to move more production away from the area. He needs to be careful with letting his division leutenants run the show by playing hardball with the unions at a time when Boeing needs to ramp up production, not let it grind to a halt altogether. They may have more experience from within Boeing and been seen by the previous CEO as leading lights but it is time for a new regime. The previous one created and proeeded with more trouble than it was worth for both customers and the company itself. Boeing might be too critical to the for all practical purposes duopoly in passenger plane making in the western world, but that deepl...

SAS monthly traffic numbers for August show low utilization of fleet and no growth. Werf says he see positive results in forward bookings but don't verify it with any numbers. And it certainly don't show in the publicised actual traffic numbers. SAS should say something monthly about freight because that is one of the things that diffferentiate it from its Scandinavian competition and other European low costs. The freight market has been booming but SAS is consistently keeping mum about it. Since they went into Chapter11 I assume they haven't been  coining it from freight and instead have missed out on this massive opportunity. Despite me pushing it for 2 years now in both articles and comments. The announcement of reducing the offer on SAS Plus to a single food item and a single drink also do not point to a future of an upmarket offer for passengers either. The inevitable slimming down of its fleet will lower its stance as a netwrok airline and without it's real premiu...

SAS Forward plan is not going well. The savings they where to get from the pilots was just to big a hill to climb for the unions. Not only wouldn't SAS hire back direct 450 pilots let go under the pandemic. The company tried the ruse with som irish underling companies to hire further pilots on new contracts far from scandinavian union influence. A move that didn't work for Norwegian and now has ended in a total 3 country pilot strike for SAS. Even the last weeks of potential strike has probably brought new bookings down to near 0 because both sides have all the way talked about potential bankruptcy. And now when tens of thousands hollidaymakers every day is looking for alternatives in an already overfull market the SAS reliability it depended on for its necesseraly slightly premium prices is in the dumps. This is a case where all press is not good press. Wonder how Werf got on in negotiations between swedish, danish and norwegian dealbrokers, unionreps and SAS mgmt mainly repre...