Airbus, the world’s biggest plane maker, said it might cut more jobs on top of the 15,000 redundancies it announced in July

• Airbus’ CEO Guillaume Faury warned that the plane manufacturer could cut more jobs because of dwindling passenger numbers during the pandemic.
• Airbus announced 15,000 job cuts in July across Europe, including many voluntary redundancies. Faury said Tuesday that more job losses might be needed.
• “No one can guarantee there won’t be compulsory redundancies if we’re to adapt to the situation, especially if it evolves further,” Faury said.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Airbus, the world’s largest plane maker, could cut even more jobs on top of the 15,000 redundancies it announced in July, its CEO Guillaume Faury said Tuesday.

The July cuts, which will be made by mid-2021, might not be enough to keep Europe’s biggest aerospace group afloat amid dwindling passenger numbers, Faury told French radio station RTL.

“The situation is so serious, and we are faced with so much uncertainty that I think no one can guarantee there won’t be compulsory redundancies if we’re to adapt to the situation, especially if it evolves further,” Faury said, adding that the company will do everything it can to avoid this.

Airbus said in July that it would cut 15% of its global workforce within a year to save money, after customer numbers dried up during the pandemic. 

This included cutting 5,000 jobs in France, 5,100 in Germany, 1,700 in the UK, 900 in Spain, and 1,300 elsewhere, on top of 900 job cuts it had planned before the crisis in Germany. The cuts would come through a voluntary redundancy scheme, it said.

In June, Airbus confirmed that it was dropping production by 40% for the next two years to offset the impact of the pandemic, per Reuters.

The industry have been severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic, despite governments contributing more than $160 million by early September to help airlines worldwide, according to the International Air Transport Association. German airline Lufthansa has been losing around $1.1 million every hour, Deutsche Welle reported, whilst British Airways has been burning through $26 million a day and is “fighting for its survival,” according to its CEO Alex Cruz.

On Tuesday, Scott McFarlane from NBC News reported that the CEOs of American Airlines and United Airlines will stage a press conference at the US Capitol Tuesday afternoon, looking for emergency federal aid to save the airline industry.

—Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) September 22, 2020