Indonesia's national flag carrier to drastically cut its fleet
Garuda Airlines - Indonesia's national flag carrier - is reported to plan to cut a large number of wide-body aircraft, while retaining dozens of narrow-body aircraft to focus on its low-cost subsidiary Citilinks.
Jakarta (VNA) - Garuda Airlines - Indonesia's national flag carrier - is reported to plan to cut a large number of wide-body aircraft,while retaining dozens of narrow-body aircraft to focus on its low-cost subsidiary Citilinks.
The Flightglobal.com website cited aviation data analytics company Cirium as saying that Garuda is looking to cutnearly 80 planes from its fleet and renegotiate or cancel orders for morethan 90 others. According to the source, Garuda is expected to launch a settlement plan in order to carry out therestructuring of the group's aircraft lease agreements as well as otherdebts.
The information was announced after Garuda lost the lawsuit for the payment of aircraft rental fees againsttwo aircraft leasing companies Helice SAS and Atterrissage SAS at the LondonCourt of International Arbitration (LCIA), in which the court ordered the airlineto pay the outstanding rent.
In the first half of 2021, Garuda continued to incur a loss of 12.870billion Rupiah (902 million USD), up 25 percent year-on-year due to theprolonged travel restrictions. In its latest financial report, Garuda saidits revenue fell 24 percent year-on-year to 696.8 million USD, of whichpassenger revenue nearly halved to 375.3 million USD.
In order to solve the problem, Garuda has implemented a number ofcost-cutting measures, including renegotiating aircraft leases, adjustingflight routes and launching an early retirement programme, thereby helping toreduce operating costs by 15.9 percent to 1.3 billion USD in the first halfof this year./.
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Illustrative image (Photo: AFP/VNA) 
