United Airlines on Thursday became the latest of the three big U.S. major carriers to signal a need for furloughs if the government doesn’t soon extend further Covid relief for the nation’s airlines. The plan calls for a furlough of 2,850 pilots, the first 1,747 to occur on October 1, the next 572 on October 30, and another 531 on November 30.
The announcement comes less than a week after Delta Air Lines said it would furlough 1,941 pilots on October 1 and American Airlines some 1,600 more on the same day.
As expected, the United Airlines unit of the Air Line Pilots Association did not react positively to the news.
“While other airlines have chosen to reduce manpower through voluntary means, it is tragic that United has limited those options for our pilots and instead has chosen to furlough more pilots than ever before in our history,” said the United master executive council (MEC) in a statement. “Since the onset of this crisis, when the coronavirus pandemic began to decimate our industry, the United MEC has reached agreement on voluntary furlough mitigations and helped champion the vital government aid that gave us a lifeline until now. Our ongoing efforts on Capitol Hill, and with management, have never let up and are made more urgent with today's announcement.”
The announcement comes two days before the scheduled expiration of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, and with it the legislation’s Payroll Support Program (PSP), which included involuntary layoff protections for employees of any airline that accepted part of a $25 billion grant package. The CARES Act also prevented airlines’ abandonment of service to communities served before they applied for their portions of the grant. Although virtually all of the U.S. major airlines have pared service to small and medium-sized cities, United and Delta have not yet said which, if any, they would completely cut, while American has announced plans to end service to 15 of them.