Norway offers Norwegian Air Shuttle loan guarantees

To me it looks more like a stay of execution than a pardon.

I know I would not buy a ticket for July or August

Thanks for posting. Fingers crossed that our group of 9 on the flight from SFO to Barcelona on June 3rd will make it, if travel restrictions are lifted by then. Strange times, new reality.

Thanks for posting this. We have tickets on Norwegian JFK to Oslo on May 30th and I have been assuming imminent bankruptcy would mean I could kiss that money goodbye. If by some miracle we are able to fly we will. If not then our chances of a refund just got a whole lot better.

I don’t think anyone will be flying to Norway before August/September, so a stay of execution until June may not be much use.

According to the current situation in Europe, it would be much more interesting if that possibility will be available at minimum till August

Update: Norwegian is looking to convert some/all its debt to equity and then to sell additional shares (I guess at like $0.10 per share by the time all the dilution has occurred) to gain access to additional funds from Norway's government. Sounds like a tough sell.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-norwegianair/norwegian-air-seeks-43-billion-debt-for-equity-deal-as-crisis-deepens-idUSKCN21Q2OQ

...and they are getting killed on fuel hedges...

https://www.aerotime.aero/rytis.beresnevicius/24784-wrong-$100-million-bet-norwegian-air-shuttle

...and March traffic numbers if you are interested...

https://www.norwegian.com/globalassets/documents/traffic-figures/traffic-report-march-2020.pdf

We are routing for Norwegian to make it out this mess

Looks like a hard choice of pouring more money into a black hole and hope it eventually turns around or stop the bleeding and say 'no more'. The former looks like the creation of "Alitalia North"

I hope and pray NA can stay in the game.

If the airline can somehow find the cashflow to survive to the other side of this and have most of its debt converted to equity, it would potentially be in a really good place. But that's an enormous if.

They are going to make it or be reborn by someone else.

The date for the 2019 annual report has been moved out to June 9.

@Jazz... There definitely will be a surplus of used and slightly-used airplanes available at bargain basement prices at the end of this, enticing veteran airline people and starry-eyed newcomers to join the industry that makes billionaires millionaires (to misquote Richard Branson).

Three months ago I said they'd be gone by summer; this just drove the nail in. Norway can't afford to make them profitable for the same reason Italy can't save Alitalia; they can't fire the management and they won't trim the staff to where it needs to be.

Using middle class taxpayers to continually bail out failing business (airlines, car companies, real estate, banks, etc) just rewards bad management. The world would be a lot better off if these zombies had been allowed to die 10 years ago. Prolonging the loss just costs more.

Not surprisingly, what little value Norwegian stock had crumbled today.

https://fortune.com/2020/04/14/norwegian-air-stock-price-debt-coronavirus-travel/

From the article:

Though there’s still hope for the airline, the situation is
“lose-lose” for shareholders, he said, downgrading the stock to
underperform with a target price of zero. [bolding mine]

But Dave, when the stock hits that target price...you can buy in and get it at a price when the upside potential is infinite!