Israel’s El Al Airlines Tries to Reinvent Itself for the Modern Era

Each Friday this summer, an El Al Airlines Boeing 787-9 — an airplane with a list price of almost $300 million, arrives in Las Vegas in the late morning, then sits for nearly 36 hours before returning to Tel Aviv late the next night. This is typically not how airlines use their newest, most efficient and priciest assets. But it's normal for Israel's national airline, which grounds its airplanes on Shabbat every week, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. It’s among the many reasons El Al, Israel’s national carrier since 1948, could be the world’s most unusual airline. “People try to compare us to Air New Zealand, but they fly on Saturdays,” CEO Gonen Usishkin said in a recent interview. It's probably no surprise El Al has struggled to turn a profit in recent years. In the first quarter of this year, the airline said it lost $55 million, a larger loss than in the same period last year, when the Passover holiday boosted revenues. In full-year 2018, El Al lost $52