Delta posts $5.4 billion 3Q loss as pandemic hammers travel

The summer travel season was even worse than expected for Delta Air Lines, which said Tuesday that it lost $5.4 billion in the third quarter as people hunkered down at home during the pandemic.

Delta officials pushed back their timetable for breaking even, from year-end to next spring, as their previous expectation that COVID-19 would be contained proved too rosy. The airline's shares slipped in afternoon trading.

However, executives said passengers are starting to return and bookings for Thanksgiving and Christmas are looking up.

“It's slow, but it's steady — week by week, they are coming back,” CEO Ed Bastian said of passengers.

Bastian said Delta plans to stop blocking middle seats in the first half of next year. That would reverse a policy that Delta has used to distinguish itself during the pandemic from its closest peers, American Airlines and United Airlines, who do not block seats.

The number of people screened at U.S. airports is down 65% this month, compared with last October, but that's better than the 68% decline in September, the 71% drop in August and the 96% plunge in mid-April.

Most of the people flying now are low-fare leisure travelers. Delta depends heavily on business travel, which is still down 85% from a year ago, Bastian said. Even there, however, the CEO was upbeat, saying that 90% of Delta's corporate customers have put some employees back in the air — just not many of them.

Bastian said a widely available vaccine, rapid COVID testing and the lifting of traveler quarantines are needed before corporate travel recovers.

Delta's loss compared with a year-ago profit of $1.5 billion and nearly matched the loss of $5.7 billion in the second quarter, when the pandemic brought air travel to a near standstill. Since then, Delta has...