Furlough Estimates

LOL, Touche :D

Well, hope no one wants to go to a football game or concert again! Can't breath the same air! :sarcasm:
 
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Derg said:
Even the people who I know that should technically know don’t even have any idea.
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I've been on calls with upper level management (a lot of them have VP or "CXX" in their titles) a bunch over the last few weeks, and none of them are sure about things happening next week let alone 6 months from now when the Government cheddar runs out.

Will there be furloughs? Probably. Will they be huge in number? Maybe. Maybe everywhere. Maybe only at some companies.

Anybody who is throwing specific percentages around (especially without putting some context around the numbers like @ZapBrannigan did) is either working an angle or tooting their own horn.
 
PositiveVibes said:
Business travel might take a little while to come back, but it will.

"You will never see eye-to-eye if you never meet face-to-face.” - Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

“Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.” - Peter Guber, CEO, Mandalay Entertainment
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While I don't doubt that business travel will take a hit structurally, this stuff is very true. There is a reason it is way easier for me to turn 13 people into pink mist with the push of a button (and talk about it in a relatively nonchalant manner) than it is for an infantryman to shoot one person. Proximity. The decision matrix, and how someone behaves is completely different when you can look each other in the eye. When I actually need something to happen in my organization, I don't send an email or call them on the phone. I show up. We have a nice conversation. I get what I need, hopefully in a win-win fashion. Pilots experience a taste of it at job fairs. How much more important is it to run into that HR gal or system chief pilot at the bar than it is to be in the crowd during the big presentation? I get a huge dose of it at inspection time. When I know someone is coming to inspect my SMS, I buckle down for weeks. It's not because it's not functioning at a high level all the time. My unit's statistics speak for themselves. I can send slides, and have VTC's every day and really DGAF what the people on the other end think. I mute it and have conversations with other people in the office. But when I have to physically show them all of my records, and we have to go out onto the line, it's visceral. I definitely don't necessarily want to take away from @SlumTodd_Millionaire 's position, because it is valid, and will have a real effect on travel. It is now perfectly acceptable to the wider population to really explore the tele/virtual-conference format, but many will find shortcomings, mostly due to psychology, and an equilibrium will be found. The smarter, non-pilot side of my brain's guess is that this particular phenomenon won't be nearly as bad as Todd says after the short-term "let's disrupt the paradigm" ideas slack off, but aggregated with people not wanting to be within 6 feet of each other for a dozen other valid and invalid reasons will create a pretty nasty mountain to dig through.
 
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ZapBrannigan said:
It is admittedly morbid, but for those of us on the bottom half of the seniority list there is value in planning and preparing for a furlough. For most of us that means updating logbooks and resumes, reconnecting with professional networks (I opened Linked In for the first time in a decade yesterday), and going through the family budget with a fine tooth comb to determine what are the must haves, what are the nice-to-haves, and what can be cut. We've also updated our will and trust to make sure that if we should both die, the kiddo is cared for. Once all of that is done, it is essentially a waiting game. I think it is a foregone conclusion that there will be furloughs come October whether your carrier took advantage of grant money or not. So there might be some value in looking analytically at how many pilots might be shed assuming demand begins to recover, but doesnt return to pre-covid levels. I think this is a reasonable assumption since we can't stay in quarantine indefinitely, but a vaccine will probably not be widely available before early 2021.

Before 9/11 the convention wisdom was that if you had 10%-15% of the pilot group behind you, you were safe from furlough. 9/11 actually resulted in a furlough that cut as deep as 30% into the seniority list at my airline. I'm sure by now we all realize that this event is significantly worse than 9/11. So lets take a look at our airlines, figure out what they're parking (permanently) and try to forecast the damage. I'll go first.

Lets take a look at WN. The grounding of the Max turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they certainly didn't need that extra lift right now (there should have been 70-80 Max on the property by now). The down side is they were already staffed for most of those airplanes. Prior to Covid19 SWAPA alleged that the company was over-staffed by around 700 pilots, which is about 50 Maxes worth. They are currently in the process of parking 100 more airplanes, although there are rumors it could go as high as 180 over the next few months. Using their numbers of approximately 14 pilots per airplane, those plus the SWAPA overstaffing estimate would yield a furlough of about 2100 to 3200 pilots or, conveniently 20%-32% of the pilot group.

MAX overstaffing: 700 pilots
Aircraft parked 100-180: 1400 - 2520 pilots
Total overstaffed by (based on fleet count): 2100 - 3220 pilots

That is back to a hire date of approximately December of 2013.

This doesn't take into account early retirements (which haven't been offered) or voluntary paid leave (because they are temporary)
579 pilots will retire within 3 years, 1400 pilots will retire within 5 years.
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I like the idea of this thread. I've done similar calculations over the past weeks. The key is to continuously validate or invalidate your assumptions which can be hard.

More importantly though, WN's not going to try to keep the streak alive? What's all that love stuff people keep talking about? Almost everybody I know there says it is a career destination "because it's been profitable for 47 years and has never laid off a pilot." Has it been a ploy this whole time?
 
I have nothing really to add to this discussion other than to say that every time I read one of @Yakob post, I pop like 2-3 bars of Klonopin/Xanax. :D

Seriously though, I was around here as a lurker for 9/11 and as a regular poster after 2008. In both instances, international travel levels dropped off of a cliff and the talk here and at FlightInfo was that tele-conferencing (and in 2008 video conferencing was just taking off) would keep businesses from dropping coin to do business face-to-face. It didn't happen then, probably won't happen now. But it will probably take a bit for airlines to see a resurgence of their cash cows, business travelers.
 
PositiveVibes said:
Business travel might take a little while to come back, but it will.

"You will never see eye-to-eye if you never meet face-to-face.” - Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

“Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.” - Peter Guber, CEO, Mandalay Entertainment
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"Chili's is the new golf course, it's where business happens." - Small Businessman Magazine.
 
MikeD said:
interesting. I wonder if businesses had not been essentially forced to go this route or to try this due to everything going on now, if this would’ve been something that would’ve taken much longer to catch on? The idea that these kinds of meetings can be had with the same or better quality as in-person, but with none of the expenses of business travel and lodging. Sure, there’s been advertisements here and there for virtual meeting websites and such for businesses, but perhaps one of the positive fallouts from all of this, in a manner of speaking, are things like this that businesses may not have tested the water on before being forced to.
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I do think that this is something that took necessity to make it happen, and it wouldn’t have happened organically. Hell, just three months ago I was talking about putting on a seminar, and someone asked me if I’d be willing to do it virtually, and I had about half a dozen reasons why I didn’t want to do that. Now I’m saying “huh, I guess that really does work.”

PositiveVibes said:
Business travel might take a little while to come back, but it will.

"You will never see eye-to-eye if you never meet face-to-face.” - Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

“Nothing replaces being in the same room, face-to-face, breathing the same air and reading and feeling each other's micro-expressions.” - Peter Guber, CEO, Mandalay Entertainment
Click to expand...

Buffett - 89 years old
Guber - 78 years old

Don‘t quote people who will be dead soon to make predictions about the future of business.
 
SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
Business is evolving before our eyes because of this. In my industry, we just did our first ever industry conference by Zoom meeting last week. We had a big name guest speaker, virtual break out sessions, etc. At the end, everyone was commenting on how they got just as much out of it as they did their last in-person conference. Everyone is figuring out in real time that we can do this stuff without traveling anymore. Business travel is going to go off a cliff, and it ain’t coming back. Not at 2019 levels. Leisure carriers like Spirit will fare better, but carriers traditionally appealing to the premium business pax are gonna get the worst of this.
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I don’t buy it. I’ve seen this prediction during each of the last four recessions. Video conferencing has been around since the mid ‘80s. Business travel will be back when the business (economy) comes back. But, that will still be a while.
 
Derg said:
I have no idea.

Even the people who I know that should technically know don’t even have any idea.
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Asked the neighbor in finance when things were going to turn around. Got this as a response:
39E6697F-9E12-4692-A502-131856A05070.jpeg
 
PERSONALLY...
I think the naysayers are F’in crazy. This is no different from anything else this world has been through. Will it take time to recover? Absolutely. 10 years? Nope. Rail travel was the highest numbers 2 years after the Spanish flu. This is just another blip on the radar. Everything will come back. Period.

www.railwayage.com

As 1918 Shows, Railroads Have Been Through This Before - Railway Age

Editor’s Note: In 1918, the world was dealing with a deadly coronavirus pandemic, the “Spanish Flu.” Longtime Trains Editor and Publisher Kevin P. Keefe, now retired and a columnist for Classic Trains, sent me his April 2, 2020 “Mileposts” blog, in which he extensively references Railway Age. It...
www.railwayage.com www.railwayage.com
 
SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
I do think that this is something that took necessity to make it happen, and it wouldn’t have happened organically. Hell, just three months ago I was talking about putting on a seminar, and someone asked me if I’d be willing to do it virtually, and I had about half a dozen reasons why I didn’t want to do that. Now I’m saying “huh, I guess that really does work.”



Buffett - 89 years old
Guber - 78 years old

Don‘t quote people who will be dead soon to make predictions about the future of business.
Click to expand...
Shots?!
 
This year, an antibody therapeutic is needed to get people comfortable leaving their homes again.

Next year a vaccine. Once those two things are in place, I would imagine people will feel safe flying. Whether they have the discretionary income to go on vacation is another question entirely.

I suspect hand shakes will slowly sunset, and we will see people wear masks in public like they do in some Asian countries. Hopefully it will change the way employers view sick time as a liability. My wife's entire division works from home. Her company set up a dedicated internet line into the house, provided her with all of the equipment she needs to do her job, and required that we have a dedicated home office that can be closed off from the rest of the house. I wouldn't be surprised to see more of that.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Old Pete said:
I don’t buy it. I’ve seen this prediction during each of the last four recessions. Video conferencing has been around since the mid ‘80s. Business travel will be back when the business (economy) comes back. But, that will still be a while.
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Video conferencing capabilities today are available to far more people, and the functionality is far superior. Zoom is not what video conferencing was 20 years ago after 9/11. I think you’re engaging in wishful thinking. But hey, I hope you’re right.
 
SlumTodd_Millionaire said:
I’d say 30% is a given. I don’t expect air travel to be back at 2019 levels for a decade.
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30% of the list at
BobDDuck said:
I've been on calls with upper level management (a lot of them have VP or "CXX" in their titles) a bunch over the last few weeks, and none of them are sure about things happening next week let alone 6 months from now when the Government cheddar runs out.

Will there be furloughs? Probably. Will they be huge in number? Maybe. Maybe everywhere. Maybe only at some companies.

Anybody who is throwing specific percentages around (especially without putting some context around the numbers like @ZapBrannigan did) is either working an angle or tooting their own horn.
Click to expand...
were all just guessing.
 
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