Airline industry faces more furloughs

US airlines are warning that thousands of airline employees may face furloughs when the federal Payroll Support Program expires in March. “As we closed out last year with the successful extension of the Payroll Support Program, we fully believed that we would be looking at a summer schedule where we’d fly all of our airplanes and need the full strength of our team,” CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom said in a memo to employees, but “vaccine is not being distributed as quickly as any of us believed, and new restrictions on international travel that require customers to have a negative COVID-19 test have dampened demand.”