The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to severely disrupt global air travel, with most airlines grounding most or all of their fleets. We expect that many airlines will try to delay taking delivery of new planes until at least the end of the summer 2020, or cancel orders where they can, which will likely result in Airbus and Boeing postponing deliveries and lowering production rates. We therefore consider that Rolls-Royce's civil aerospace division will likely be affected by lower engine sales and lower fly-by-the-hour receipts from airlines in 2020. We are therefore placing our ratings on Rolls-Royce on CreditWatch with negative implications. We plan to resolve the CreditWatch as soon as we can further assess and quantify the impact
