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Comment by atlasunshrugged | Hacker News Reader

I'll be fascinated to see which airlines make it out of this alive (with and without a bailout) and the long term repercussions. Seems like the cheapo airlines will probably go under relatively quickly because they're on razor thin margins but even United and anyone with global route exposure is going to get hurt really badly by this.

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I am starting to think that only the partly/fully state-owned airlines will make it out alive.

Airlines are too important to the economy - plenty of them will get gov guarantees / bailouts

Yes, interesting. Hope Norwegian survive. Before Norwegian I often paid like 350$ for a trip to Oslo (40 minutes). It was only one single provider, SAS. After Norwegian arrived usually around 100, often 50.

Forget about just global routes, all or nearly all routes might be grounded soon enough. It would be the sensible thing to do.

To me it feels that the deciding factor will be in the differences of how different airlines have structured their airplane ownership/rentals/leasing/whatever; for some airlines downsizing to a smaller number of planes will be much cheaper than others.

It's basically a doomed industry in the medium to long term (unless humanity collectively decides to fly straight into a wall wrt global CO2 emissions). Any politician using tax money to prop this up is acting irresponsibly and unethically.

However, people need to travel. And they will travel. Calling it a doomed industry is bogus.

There is a demand for air travel obviously but no absolute need. We don't have to stop it completely, just most of it.

With all the european countries closing their borders on a small continent, it's pretty easy to guess that the european airlines will be hit worst. They don't have much domestic traffic to fall back to.

I think the airlines from the middle east might survive since they are propped up by the state. For example Emirates and Etihad. And of course China is in good shape to prop up their own airlines.

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