Originally Posted by Astro14
Time will tell.
In all this chaos is opportunity. Companies positioned to grow quickly will be able to seize opportunities for routes, markets, etc. when air travel returns.
Parking airplanes permanently ensures that those companies will not be able to respond to new conditions in say, this next year, when they're presented.
When you decide to park a fleet type, you're making a permanent size reduction. It requires reducing staffing. Furloughing flight attendants is easy, they're fungible. Take the bottom 20% and lay them off, and you can still fly every flight.
Furloughing pilots is a complex, long, expensive process because of training requirements. For each pilot furloughed, about 4 more need to be re-trained to balance out the distribution across aircraft types and right/left seat. Each training event takes a pilot out of production/flying for at least 6 weeks, and up to several months, depending on training loads and simulator availability. So, you're paying those guys to stay at home while they wait for training. So, furlough one pilot, and you're eating the cost of 24 weeks (1/2 man-year) of a pilot not working, but getting paid, as a minimum. During the post- 9-11 furloughs at major US airlines, the entire retraining process took years. Years... Parking an entire fleet is a big, expensive, permanent decision.
Liquidity and the ability to survive is the critical issue right now. As a data point the big airlines (AA, DL, UA, SW) are burning through about $100 million/day. That's the cost of labor, aircraft leases/payments, facilities leases, and all the other fixed costs that can't be reduced in the short term. Sure, fuel costs have gone down, but who cares when the revenue is off by 95%? You're still burning through cash at a furious rate.
The companies that are parking entire fleet types are ensuring that they can't bounce back. They're managing through this, by doing the predictable short-term thing, trying to slash costs any way they can. But that's not planning for the future, it's simply reacting in panic for today. And that set of fleet reduction decisions comes with big costs (pilot re-training) in the future, so I'm not convinced that it's even the best for their balance sheet in the medium term, and certainly not for the long term.
We will see.
In the meantime, I encourage you to read this:
https://hbr.org/2020/03/are-you-leading-through-the-crisis-or-managing-the-response