When Bankruptcy Is The Best Solution
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The management at AMR’s American Airlines should be praying hard, since only an act of God can now save their company from an eventual bankruptcy filing. The bankruptcies by Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines on Sept. 14 were close enough to Sept. 11 to revive memories of its impact on the airline industry. More importantly, it leaves American as the only legacy carrier that has not resorted to a court ordered restructuring. From my 25 years of involvement in and reporting on bankruptcies, as well as lifetime career in finance, I have learned a few things about when bankruptcy becomes both inevitable and even desirable. AMR (nyse: AMR - news - people ) has reached that point. One need only look back at history to see why this is so. Legacy airlines are those that grew fat and happy during a time when the government regulated the industry, dictating fares and route competition. When deregulation came more than 25 years ago, new carriers sprang up and highlighted the structural flaws that regulation had instilled in this industry. Peter Drucker, in his writings on management, pointed out that all industries had one–or more–of three common structural weaknesses. They were either labor intensive, capital intensive or vulnerable to the cost and supply of a key commodity. Airlines are in the unhappy situation of having all three weaknesses. With deregulation, legacy carriers found themselves with labor costs, work rules and cost structures that could not compete against new upstarts. One-by-one, Pan Am, TWA, Eastern, Braniff, United, US Air, Continental (nyse: CAL - news - people ) and a multitude of smaller players threw in the towel. AMR, like its peers, used the threat of bankruptcy to extract wage concessions and work-rule changes from its employees–changes that would have allowed it to become more efficient and enable it to trim back unprofitable routes. This did not, however, relieve it of employee seniority costs (i.e. the higher wages earned by its more senior “last to go” employees and their higher pension costs)–costs, which an upstart carrier doesn’t have. But even after squeezing its labor force, AMR is still left with billions in debt from the hundreds of aircraft it does not want and the expensive airport gates that are being under-utilized. Only through bankruptcy can they quickly reduce this large and costly accumulated debt. The current spike in fuel prices–the third vulnerability–became the straw that broke the camel’s back for Delta (nyse: DAL - news - people ). Escalating fuel costs have been a perennial problem for airlines, because they make many aircraft obsolete even before they are able to recover their cost through operations. This is why the upstart airlines fly the newest fuel-efficient planes, not cheap, used ones. In short, the aircraft fleets of legacy carriers are overvalued. In the past, the practice for airlines was to wait until they ran out of cash, had big payments coming due or lost their credit lines before filing bankruptcy. Hence, by the time they filed, the companies had a huge hole in their balance sheet or a negative net worth. In Delta’s case, this hole was $7 billion before counting an additional $10 billion for unfunded pension liability; in Northwest’s (nasdaq: NWAC - news - people ) case, $4 billion before a $6 billion pension shortfall. |