Luis Ceriotto
05/05/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
Economy
Updated 05/05/2021 6:00 AM
The new restrictions generated by the second wave of the pandemic once again attacked the activity of airlines within the country, with only
a handful
of international flights making the same number of arrivals and take-offs throughout a day. that before the pandemic took
two or three hours to complete.
Aerolineas Argentinas was not necessarily the main loser with this new flight scheme, since most of its activity since October - when regular passenger flights returned - had focused on the
cabotage
market
.
Little by little he had started to fly more planes, which take off both from
Ezeiza
and from
Aeroparque
.
Even one of its routes, the one that connects Ezeiza with Miami six times a week, is
filled
with
full planes
, with passengers who in many cases travel to the US
to get vaccinated against Covid.
An Aerolineas Airbus 330-200, with which the state line flies six times a week to Miami.
With that fleet, too, flights are made to bring vaccines from Russia and China.
But beyond the restrictions imposed by the Government through the
National Civil Aviation Agency
(ANAC) and the exceptional case of the route to Miami, Aerolineas register a
dramatic drop
in demand. This was stated by its president,
Pablo Ceriani
, in an internal communication to the staff that he released in the last hours, where he stated that the state company
is working at 20% of its capacity
.
"Today we are flying very little, we have a very large idle capacity,
without reactivation plans,
" said Ceriani, who politically responds to the national senator and leader of
La Cámpora, Mariano Recalde.
"The overall demand for our services is
approximately 20%
of the potential supply of our business structure." Added Ceriani.
According to the 2021 Budget that Minister Martín Guzmán had sent to Congress last year, the Executive Branch had predicted that Aerolineas will lose a new multimillion-dollar figure throughout this year:
44,796 million pesos
, equivalent (at today's exchange rate). ) to
$ 454 million
.
This loss is compensated with
subsidies from the Treasury
which, since the airline was nationalized in mid-2008, has been turning over to Aerolineas
the equivalent of about 7.3 billion dollars
.
The Minister of Health, Carla Vizzotti, and the president of Aerolineas Argentinas, Pablo Ceriani, receiving a batch of Sputnik V vaccines.
"We are facing an extremely complicated context for all Argentines and, like last year, it
is an enormous effort for the National State to sustain the company
in this context," admitted Ceriani in his letter, with a tone
very far from the epic
of his most recent messages, after the flights to Russia and China to bring vaccines. "It is essential that all of us become aware of the moment we are living and that we bear in mind that
all the measures we take in the coming months
will have a single objective as their goal: that Aerolineas Argentinas overcome this storm, the final impact of which we still do not
know,
" he said.
Inside the company they admitted that they launched this message to open the umbrella. In Airlines
there is a salary discussion in pause mode
, which should be resumed this month. "It was necessary to put all Aerolineas workers in a state of situation. The situation of the commercial aviation industry in the world is very complicated. Aerolineas, despite having the support of the State as a public company, is not immune to this situation. And at times we receive proposals as if we were in a stage of
growth and expansion
. "
