It's not time to panic quite yet. It's a good time to prepare, however, by building up the savings account. If you don't need it come May 1 then roll it over into a strike fund for the next round of negotiations in 2022.
The bad news here in the 8-k is that jetblue had a significant amount of passengers cancel their travel plans this quarter. That's not surprising considering the growth in covid-19 cases the last month or two. Discussions predicting a larger second wave come fall time have been happening since the spring, so the Q4 daily cash burn forecast was always tenuous.
The good news here is that a fair amount of demand returned prior to the current wave of covid case growth even as US covid activity outpaced much of the rest of the world. While the current travel demand isn't as durable as the company would like, it appears resilient. As long as people remain financially solvent and we have high rates of vaccine participation we will likely see a similar return of travel demand as community spread slows, eventually stops, and covid case numbers decrease. Given the high rate of effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, that confidence could spark an even greater rebound of demand.
There's still some uncertainty surrounding when the FDA will approve the Pfizer vaccine and how that affects its distribution, but it's likely to come before the end of December.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/30/...-and-for-whom/
However the vaccine is initially distributed, it sounds like anyone who wants a vaccine will be able to get one by sometime in May.
If that holds true, we'll be reaching herd immunity just in time for the busy summer season and people who have been mostly cooped up at home for the past year decide to travel again.
Plenty could go wrong between now and May first. A vaccine could have manufacturing issues, distribution problems, low participation rates, serious unforeseen side effects, or the more typical risks that are always present like natural disaster or geopolitical conflict, which could hurt a recovery.
Right now Jetblue is sitting on $2.8 billion in cash, can take another billion in CARES Act loans and management has stated they have other options to raise cash if required. So while there will likely be more debt to pay back, there's a high probability of a strong recovery on the horizon and jetblue has the liquidity to get to that point.