WASHINGTON (Reuters) – American Airlines Chief Executive Doug Parker will tell a U.S. Senate committee that $54 billion in COVID-19 U.S. government assistance “saved the airline industry,” according to testimony seen by Reuters.
Parker is set to testify alongside the chief executives of Southwest Airlines and United Airlines on Wednesday.
He will tell the panel that had Congress structured the entire assistance as government loans most airlines “would have survived by shutting down flying in April 2020, furloughing almost all of our teams, and waiting for demand to return to levels strong enough to justify restoring flying. As it turns out, that would have been sometime in 2021.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese)
