Hawaiian Airlines (HA, Honolulu) does not expect to take delivery of its first B787-9 earlier than 2022 or 2023, amid ongoing discussions with Boeing about their re-timing, President and Chief Executive Peter Ingram said during the carrier's quarterly earnings call.

"We have also continued to have productive discussions with Boeing to re-phase our B787 order. While not finalized, we do not expect to put the first two B787s into service until 2022 or 2023," Ingram said.

The carrier originally planned to start taking its B787-9s in the first quarter of 2021. It has five aircraft on order from Boeing with a further five due to arrive from lessors, and ten more options.

"In light of our deferrals of B787 pre-delivery payments, as well as non-aircraft CapEx we now expect our CapEx in the back half of 2020 to be between USD9 million and USD19 million totaling between USD103 million and USD113 million for the full year, which includes our last A321neo that was delivered in the second quarter," Chief Financial Officer Shannon Okinaka added.

The airline posted a USD251.3 million net loss for the first half of the year and said it had USD761 million in unrestricted cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments as of June 30, 2020. However, since then, it has raised significant additional cash. In July, Hawaiian Airlines raised USD114 million through the sale-and-leaseback of two A321-200neo, secured access to a loan of up to USD364 million from the Economic Relief Program under the federal CARES Act, and has offered USD217 million in Class A certificates secured against six A321neo and two A330-200s. The offering will close on August 5, 2020.

Ingram added that while the airline was hoping to avoid involuntary furloughs "to the extent feasible", it would probably not be able to completely prevent them and was likely to issue a WARN Act notice informing staff of planned layoffs in the coming days.

Hawaiian Airlines joined in calls by other carriers to extend the payroll support programme beyond its current expiration date of September 30. Ingram underlined that continuing federal assistance for another six months would, in the end, reduce the total number of workers affected once it finally expires.

"In a world where the restrictions on a CARES 2.0 were no different from what we saw in the first version of CARES [i.e. ban on furloughs in return for payroll support], I think it is pretty clear that the number of involuntary job losses in the industry would be a lot lower at the end of March than they are likely to be at the end of September," Ingram underlined.