Apparently UAL conducted an employee town hall today. The rumor is (and this is unsubstantiated) that the plan is to furlough a minimum of 25% and maybe over 50% come 1 Oct.

There’s no really useful info yet on the United APC forum. But the rumor jives with the tone of UAL’s earnings call today.

Does anybody have any UAL buds that can verify or offer better info?

Edit: new info from Twitter [MENTION=87016]TheAirchive[/MENTION]:
#United Town Hall 05/01/2020
- Original plan 7 weeks ago was demand down 70% for 2 months, then recover. Didn’t happen. - Demand essentially still down 100% with no sign of uptick. - SWA now planning on a 5 year recovery SWA has 14 Billion cash on hand.
- UAL has only 9.6 billion cash - UAL had 6 billion at start of crisis - SWA much smaller than UAL - UAL would have to have 25 billion to match SWA - UAL must reduce cash burn - AA & DAL cash burn 70M/day - UAL burning 45M/day
- SWA very aggressive & wants more assets as others collapse: wants to be only carrier in DEN & largest in Chicago. - Displacement bid for Pilots tomorrow
- Will mitigate with job share, early outs, etc. Innovative plans. Working with unions. - Gave in to IAM. Now all IAM agents going to 30 hrs/week, not original planned 20.
- Say that they can legally cut hours (under CARE). No hourly $ cuts, just the hours worked. IAM fighting back strong, but that’s what they should do, according to Kirby. - All employee groups will have hours, not dollar, cuts.
- Need a vaccine before everyone returns. - UAL loss was so much bigger than others because of write downs. - Measure of an airline now is Cash Burn. UAL is beating everyone with the lowest cash burn. - UAL cash burn down 50%-60%
- Hoping for demand to recover by 10/1. If not, drastic action for long term survival. - Prepare for worse case - Cost structure must match demand: If demand down 30%, payroll must be down 30%. If demand down 90%, payroll must be down 90%
- Took an ax to every expense except employees. - Nobody knows when demand will return. Still no improvement. - Most optimistic, still down 30% in October. - Better picture in June/July. - Fingers crossed.
- Not hedging fuel. Does not work. - May: UAL 63 int’l flights/week. 9 per day. DAL 50. - “When you’re going through hell, keep going”. Kirby & Winston Churchill
- More hard questions from IAH employees than anywhere else. - If considering/near retirement be aware that schedules, bids,routes,quality of life,& everything will change.Not going to be anything like schedules & airline life was in the past.