Originally Posted by dera

Let's actually read the financial statement.

American does not have 21 billion in cash, not even close. They ended 2021 with 273 million of unrestricted cash and if you add restricted cash, total of 408 million.

They ended 2021 with 15.8 billion of liquidity. The problem is, they had to borrow 6 billion more to reach that number. They now have liabilities including debt of almost 60 billion dollars. That's why their shareholder deficit is 7.3 billion, so their shareholders lost almost half a billion since 2020, because that increased "liquidity" is just added borrowing, not actual cash.

Their operating loss, excluding all the fluff, was 1 billion dollars in 2021. Add 1.8 billion in interest payments, and you can quickly see how much more revenue they need before they can start paying back that debt. Finding almost 3 billion of profit is not going to be easy. Until that happens, AAG will keep hemorrhaging money. Having 15 billion in liquidity doesn't help when it's less than half of what they borrowed. And before you say "but we have new airplanes!", the liabilities exceed the assets by over 7 billion dollars. As a matter of fact, the whole fleet of AAG is only worth 37.8 billion dollars. Every single airplane. With current and non-current debt at 38 billion, you can see the new airplanes argument is pretty weak.

AAG might be too big to fail, I don't believe anyone wants to Ch7 it, but they will have to do something to restructure the airline. The numbers don't lie.

And no, this is not a "get your financial house in order" post, I'm just stating cold hard numbers. Interpret them the way you want.