Virgin Atlantic, other UK airlines beg for bailout

Last updated on September 11th, 2021 at 02:59 pm

Virgin Atlantic is leading Britain’s airline industry to request for emergency government support worth up to £7.5 billion and avert a catastrophe that would wipe out tens of thousands of jobs.

Sky News and other news outlets reported on Saturday that Peter Norris, the chairman of Virgin Atlantic Airways’ majority shareholder, Virgin Group, will write to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday to warn that the sector needs immediate financial aid to survive.

The bailout request will come ahead of what could prove to be the bloodiest week in British aviation history, with British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, easyJet and Ryanair all expected to announce mass groundings of aircraft and potentially huge redundancies as the COVID-19 crisis escalates.

Mr Norris’s letter – which is also understood to be being signed by Shai Weiss, Virgin Atlantic’s chief executive – would ask the government to provide airlines with a credit facility to help them finance themselves through a potentially protracted period of negligible revenue.

That support, which the Virgin chairman estimates would be worth between £5bn and £7.5bn across the industry, would include cash advances and guarantees, as well as other measures to ensure that credit card companies do not continue to hoard revenue from airline bookings.

Under Mr Norris’s blueprint, this emergency financing would be repaid once trading returns to more normal levels.

Mr Norris would also ask the PM to extend the timetable for allowing airlines to keep planes grounded without losing their prized take-off and landing slots for the entire summer season.

The trade body IATA has estimated that the airline industry globally could forfeit $113bn in revenue as a result of COVID-19 – a figure it may have to increase again.

(SkyNews)