Airline will drop 2,500 by March About 160 of US Airways' employees at Philadelphia's airport will be among them as it moves to reduce costs.

Facing costs that aren't going down and revenues that aren't going up, US Airways Group Inc. said yesterday that it would eliminate an additional 2,500 jobs by March, slashing its workforce 7.1 percent. And more cuts could soon follow.

The immediate reductions, from pilots to baggage handlers, started yesterday with the closing of an airline maintenance hangar in Tampa, Fla., where 300 employees were based. The work will be consolidated at US Airways facilities in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C.

In Philadelphia, where the airline controls 68 percent of the passenger traffic, the cuts mean that about 160 full-time ticket-counter agents, gate agents, and baggage handlers will lose their jobs in the next three months. Fifty-eight part-timers will be hired in their place.

Also, an uncertain number of flight attendants could soon be out of work here. Almost 60 percent of the airline's 6,400 flight attendants live in the Philadelphia region; US Airways said yesterday that it expected to furlough about 800 nationwide.

US Airways also might eliminate 60 pilot jobs throughout the country.

The bankrupt airline said it was imperative to announce the cuts, just two days before Thanksgiving, in order to stay on track to meet the requirements of a financial restructuring plan it outlined in August when it filed for bankruptcy protection. Since then, US Airways, which lost $852 million in this year's first nine months, had already eliminated 2,500 jobs.

"There's never an easy time to tell employees their job has been eliminated," airline spokesman David Castelveter said yesterday. But "we are not getting our cost reductions on the revenue side," he continued. "So we need to immediately reduce our costs . . . so we can emerge from Chapter 11 in the first quarter of 2003."

US Airways expects to file its bankruptcy reorganization plan by Dec. 20 to show how it can make money. The airline, which was facing financial problems before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, had 49,000 employees before then. Now it has 35,000.

"You're seeing US Airways getting down to the lean-mean fighting machine," George Hamlin, senior vice president of Global Aviation Associates, a Washington consulting firm, said yesterday. "It's going to be reduced now to the core of what it needs, and then become an effective competitor."