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India’s Jet Airways halts all international and domestic operations
One of India’s major airlines, Jet Airways, has announced it is temporarily halting flight operations on Wednesday after the carrier failed to secure the “critical interim funding” necessary for the company to remain afloat.
Jet Airways will operate the last flight on Wednesday as it cancels all its international and domestic flights, the airline said in a statement. It explained that it cannot afford to pay for fuel or other critical services to keep the operations going, as all its months-long attempts to seek both interim and long-term funding were in vain.
“Unfortunately, despite its very best efforts, the airline has been left with no other choice today but to go ahead with a temporary suspension of flight operations,” the statement reads.
Earlier this month, the airline’s fleet was significantly reduced to just five aircraft and it was forced to suspend international operations. On Wednesday, the Jet Airways website listed only 37 domestic flights and had an additional nine-page list of canceled flights, saying that the schedule was impacted by “operational reasons.”
The troubled company failed to receive a stop-gap loan of about $217 million from its lenders as part of a rescue deal agreed in late March, Reuters earlier reported.
“Bankers did not want to go for a piecemeal approach which would keep the carrier flying for a few days and then again risk having Jet come back for more interim funding,” an unnamed bank source in the negotiations on the debt resolution process told the agency.
The uncertainty over the crucial funding crashed Jet Airways stock on Tuesday, with shares plunging around 20 percent.
Employees have been hit hardest by the crisis in the company and have reportedly not been paid in months. The pilots even called on the State Bank of India (SBI) to release the necessary funds and appealed to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to save 20,000 jobs which may be lost in the shutdown.
Russian carriers ‘suspend indefinitely’ all Boeing 737 MAX purchases
Contracts for the purchase of troubled Boeing 737 MAX aircraft have been suspended indefinitely by a number of Russian airlines, according to Vladimir Afonsky, a member of the Russia’s State Duma (Parliament) Committee on Transport and Construction.
He told TASS, with a reference to Deputy Transport Minister Aleksandr Yurchik, that these were contracts for the supply of several dozen aircraft to UTair, Ural Airlines, Pobeda Airlines and S7.
The indefinite suspension will last “until the circumstances of this situation [the two recent crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX planes] were ascertained,” Afonsky said.
Ural Airlines had ordered 14 MAX aircraft from Boeing, with the first jet expected to arrive in October. Pobeda Airlines (part of the Aeroflot Group) was planning to buy 30 planes. It has not sealed a firm contract yet but had already made an advance payment for the aircraft.
Aeroflot CEO Vitaly Savelyev said earlier that the company could refuse operating twenty MAX planes ordered for Pobeda.
Earlier this month, Boeing 737 MAX planes were grounded worldwide after two similar crashes just months apart. Last October, a Lion Air jet crashed in Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board. On March 10, another crash killed 157 people in Ethiopia.
WestJet suspends 2019 financial guidance over Boeing 737 MAX grounding
Today WestJet announced that following Transport Canada’s safety notice closing Canadian airspace to Boeing 737 MAX aircraft until further notice, the Federal Aviation Administration’s temporary grounding order and Boeing’s decision to suspend all MAX deliveries to airline customers, it is suspending all 2019 financial guidance provided on December 4, 2018 and February 5, 2019. The financial guidance provided with respect to earnings per share (EPS), return on invested capital (ROIC) and cumulative free-cash flow over the period of 2020-2022 remains in place until further information is known.
Through proactive planning and preparation for a variety of scenarios, including grounding, WestJet enacted its contingency plan immediately and grounded all thirteen of its MAX aircraft within 55 minutes of Transport Canada’s order with only three MAX aircraft outside of its Canadian jurisdiction. WestJet continues to implement and execute its contingency plan to minimize guest disruption and any financial impact. For the remainder of the first quarter WestJet expects it will be able to protect approximately 86 per cent of guests booked on MAX flights and cover approximately 75 per cent of the flights that were intended to operate on the MAX with other aircraft.