Inside American Airlines’ Scramble as Virus Grounds Jets by Hundreds – The New York Times

On Monday morning, American Airlines Flight 1 departed John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, bound for Los Angeles. It had six passengers.

The flight is normally one of the airline’s busiest and most profitable. Now it is a money pit, a cross-country symbol of how thoroughly the coronavirus pandemic has decimated commercial air travel in a matter of weeks.

Never before has customer demand dropped so swiftly, and never before has it been less clear when — or even if — the global airline industry will truly recover.

“This is scary,” said José Freig, American’s head of Latin America operations, who is now managing the company’s coronavirus response team. “It’s difficult to find a bottom on this one.”