As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, Allen and Dan discuss the impacts on the aircraft industry and the internal workings of aircraft companies. How many aircraft OEMs will survive this world-changing struggle?

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Transcript

Dan: Welcome back! This is episode 4 of the Struck Podcast. I'm your co-host DanBlewett and I'm here joined remotely by lightning protection expert Allen Hall. Allen, how are you doin?

Allen: Great Dan, how are you doin' down in Washington DC?

Dan: I am doing well. It's been beautiful the last couple days. It was almost eighty degrees yesterday. And so it's really nice out now but pretty windy. I think I want to probably get a run in after the podcast is over. But yeah it's still, the ghost town which I think is the right thing to do. But how's 

Williamstown doing? Is it warming up there yet?

Allen: No. In fact your wind storm is our snowstorm. It's supposed to snow tonight between one and three inches. So tomorrow would have been a snow day for the kids not to go to school, but obviously, they're home already. So that's out the window. But we have not reached spring yet. We're still a couple good weeks away from real spring. 

Dan: Yikes.We're--you know as we talked about-- weeks away from anything right now. There's only one thing we're all wondering how many weeks away it is which is when does this whole thing start to end. Got any predictions? 

Allen: I think we're talking about middle May. And just listening to some news last night and some airline talk over the last couple of days, it seems like in at least the United States you may see some activity and some people returning to work and being a little more productive. Starting in May and then it slowly gradually increases where we bring people back and get things going again. I was just at one of our customers' facilities earlier today and there was roughly twenty percent of the people there. And it's been that way for a couple of weeks but they're also thinking maybe next week a couple more people can come back. Not huge percentages. But as things have leveled out, at least around us, they're probably gonna bring some of them back.

Dan: Yeah. So as we check up on the airline industry, there are a couple new news stories just recently. So Boeing and Airbus are both closing some factories down at least temporarily. You know Airbus in Alabama they're not laying off their employees, they're gonna have their jobs back it sounds like. But they're just heading home for right now. So they are furloughed I guess. And then Germanwings which is the low-budget airline from Lufthansa overseas sounds like they're shutting them down for good and just sort of consolidating with their overall bigger brand. Do you expect more of this?  

Allen: Too many airplanes

Dan: Yeah. I mean is this a...I was listening to another podcast earlier today and they were talking about auto industry brands. And that at one point there were a hundred ten different auto manufacturers. Brands like Chrysler, Ford, Jeep. And like economic downturns like this can sort of just eliminate some of the ones we don't need  necessarily. Do you feel like that's happening here in aviation? 

Allen: Yeah. Downturns have predicted winners and losers. If you have enough cash stored away and you have an ability to quickly scale back up, you're gonna be a winner. If you don't you're going to be gone. And you saw that in the aircraft industry in the United States through if you look into the late 60s and the early 70s. There was a lot of small aircraft manufacturing--a lot of more aircraft manufacturing. Douglas Aircraft, McDonnell Douglas is still around. Yeah. There was a lot more aircraft manufacturers. A lot of them were leftover from sort of World War 2 era.