The $58 billion airline smash and grab bailout comes with several restrictions, including maintaining service to cities that already have flights and no employee furloughs through September 30.

Right after the package passed, United Airlines said to expect furloughs in the fall. At the end of the day Fewer customers and fewer flights will be serviced by fewer people. Subsidizing airlines with nearly $60 billion doesn’t change that – it just delays it to the fall.

In an employee ‘crew news’ session on Friday, held electronically instead of in-person and uploaded Sunday evening to the company’s intranet, airline President Robert Isom told flight attendants that once government restrictions on furloughs lift after September there are a number of things that will help to shrink employee numbers before getting to furloughs.

We have to identify what the airline is going to look like when demand comes back, as we look out to 2021, and that will help us determine the fleet, the people we need throughout the system. And to that end, everything you talked about Jill in terms of leaves, in terms of potential early retirement or early out programs, all of those kind of things I think are going to be the things that we can really depend and rely on to get us sized appropriately.

Don’t forget we were going to hire..1500 flight attendants this year. We do have natural attrition.

Isom told the pilots that “We’re really trying to make it through the summer so we can see where demand is ultimately going to take us and how that impacts the company going forward.” There, too, he emphasized upcoming retirements “to resize the operation..by almost 1000 pilots” which reduces the need for furloughs.

He concludes that pilot furloughs is “not something that’s in the cards” – a statement he didn’t offer to flight attendants.

Ultimately to project furloughs you have to make a whole bunch of assumptions about when and to what extent travel demand returns by the fall.

• when the country begins coming out from shelter in place orders and other travel restrictions (probably not until June), and how staggered those restrictions lift either geographically (based on what areas have contained the virus) or on groups of people (those who have already had the virus, the non-elderly).

• the pace of economic recover after restrictions lift. It won’t be immediate.

• whether businesses and individuals start traveling immediately, or work to repair their balance sheets first (resist spending)

• the extent to which social norms around business travel (online conferencing) and leisure travel (continued desire to social distance) impact demand

At the end of the day I expect minimum hours for employees past September 30, and furloughs remain a possibility in anything but the best case scenarios.