SAS Scandinavian Airlines files for Chapter 11 in the US.
SAS Group, the parent of SAS Scandinavian Airlines, has filed for Chapter 11 restructuring in the United States, warning strike action by pilots had impacted its financial position and liquidity.
Salary talks between SAS and its pilots collapsed on Monday, triggering a strike that adds to the travel chaos across Europe as the peak summer vacation period begins.
The Stockholm-based company said it had “voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 in the US, a legal process for financial restructuring conducted under US federal court supervision”.
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The airline said that its operations and flight schedule will be unaffected by the filing, although the pilot strike is impacting its flight schedule.
SAS pilots based in Denmark, Sweden and Norway walked out on Monday, citing inadequate pay and working conditions and expressing dissatisfaction with the decision by the carrier to hire new pilots to fill vacancies at its subsidiary airlines, SAS Link and SAS Connect, rather than re-hire former company pilots laid off due to the pandemic.
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The walkout is estimated to lead to the cancellation of approximately 50% of all scheduled SAS flights, affecting around 30,000 passengers per day.
Anko van der Werff, chief executive of SAS Group, said the strikes are “devastating for SAS and puts the company’s future together with the jobs of thousands of colleagues at stake.
“Over the last several months we’ve been working hard to improve our cost structure and improve our financial position,” he said.
“We are making progress, but a lot of work remains, and the ongoing strike has made an already challenging situation even tougher. The Chapter 11 process gives us legal tools to accelerate our transformation while being able to continue to operate the business as usual.”
SAS needs to attract new investors and has said that in order to do that it must slash costs across the company, including for staff and for leased planes that stand idle because of closed Russian airspace and a slow recovery in Asia.
