Booking and cooking

Delta called in European journalists to talk up its planned transatlantic expansion, but the scribes and scribblers focused more on short-term matters such as the increasingly public pilot rhetoric threatening a strike if the Number Three carrier and the Air Line Pilots Association can not reach a new concessions deal by 15 April. Chief executive Gerry Grinstein said the airline is already seeing 'the book-away' effect in reservations for the next two months "as people become more concerned" though he said he couldn't and wouldn't specify amounts. If the pilots do strike, "we're cooked," he said. The airline's debt covenants let its lenders call in their $2 billion in financing after the first 48 hours of an interruption, and after that "we'd be gone. There would be no Delta." But Grinstein said he still thought a deal would be done this spring.