Originally Posted by
senecacaptain
nobody is buying AA unless they declare Ch. 11 first, which also typically nullifies all union contracts
if you see AA declare, the sharks will start to circle. It may not be another airline. It may be a hedge fund, JoAnn Fabrics, or Toms Ice Cream Truck Company, with the "airline investment" as some sort of investment experiment.
Sun Country, Frontier, etc. type situation.
It's difficult to see a path forward for a hedge fund or holding company to be interested in AA due to the amount of debt they're carrying. Even in profitable times, it would take over a decade of profitability to make an appreciable dent in the amount of debt they hold. There just isn't anything attractive about investing anything in them in the short term. And in times like these no one is really thinking big strategic moves, they're thinking survival. We're at the beginning of this still. It's only been not even 6 months. The likelihood of rolling waves of the virus and more shutdowns is high. No one knows how far this goes and how deep the pain is going to become for our economy.
The only hope AA has is that the federal government pressures creditors to throw them a life-line like they did with the US auto makers in the recent past. In exchange the federal government would take a large stake in AA and there would be new stock issued in CH11. This would likely trigger at the very least a CH11 filing from United as well so that they could restructure and gut labor contracts like AA will do. The next few years are going to he awful for 121 passenger ops most likely.