US Airways will have the cash it needs to keep flying through June after a bankruptcy judge approved a deal Thursday between the struggling airline and the federal Air Transportation Stabilization Board.
An interim financing deal had been set to expire Saturday, but U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Mitchell gave his blessing to an extension through June 30.
By then, the airline, the nation's seventh-biggest carrier, hopes it will have found a new investor to provide hundreds of millions of dollars needed to emerge from bankruptcy protection.
The extension comes after US Airways, a unit of US Airways Group Inc., extracted more than $800 million in annual concessions from its labor unions. Most unions reluctantly agreed to accept pay and benefit cuts, but Mitchell last week imposed an estimated $269 million in concessions on the International Association of Machinists when that union failed to reach a deal.
US Airways said it needed those savings to persuade the ATSB to extend the financing agreement. The airline had previously warned it would likely have been forced to liquidate if it had not obtained an extension.
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