Hong Kong based airline Cathay Pacific Airways is cutting jobs from its mainline and shutting down its regional airline Cathay Dragon completely.

Cathay Pacific Airways said Wednesday about 5,300 employees based in Hong Kong and another 600 elsewhere will likely lose their jobs, and 2,600 unfilled positions will be cut.

"The global pandemic continues to have a devastating impact on aviation and the hard truth is we must fundamentally restructure the group to survive," Cathay Pacific CEO Augustus Tang said in a statement. "We have to do this to protect as many jobs as possible, and meet our responsibilities to the Hong Kong aviation hub and our customers," Tang said.

Cathay Pacific currently losing about 1.5 billion Hong Kong dollars ($193.5 million) to 2 billion Hong Kong ($258 million) dollars a month currently. The announced cuts will lower that loss to approvimately 500 million Hong Kong dollars ($64.5 million).

The statement says the future remains highly uncertain and it is clear that recovery is slow. Based on IATA predictions, passenger travel will not return to pre-COVID-19 levels until 2024.

The company says that assuming the vaccines currently under development prove to be effective and are successfully rolled out on a global scale by summer 2021, they expect to be operating at well below 25% capacity in the first half of 2021, but expects to see a gradual recovery in capacity in the second half of the year.