Global Crossing Airlines Group Inc. (JET) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. We're going to start the monthly Global Crossing Airlines management update. Thank you for registering and attending. I'm Grant Howard, President of The Howard Group. And this will be the fifth, I believe, management update since June, and that speaks to, and this is fact, the amount of progress that the company has been making as it moves towards certification and starting flights by first thing in 2021. I want to introduce Ed Wegel, who's the President and CEO at the head of the table. And on my left, Ryan Goepel, who is the Chief Financial Officer. And with that, gentlemen, I'm going to turn it over to you, but -- sorry, just one last thing for the participants at the bottom of your screen, you'll see a Q&A. If you do have questions, just use that button, and then I will address the questions at the end of the presentation. Now Ed and Ryan, it's yours.

Great. Thanks, Grant, and thanks, everyone, for coming on our November -- end of October, November update for Global Crossing. We're doing this a few days earlier than we did last month primarily because, as you may know, the whole period, the lockup period for the shares that were sold in the offering back in June, that lockup ends on Monday. And we wanted to provide assurances on our plan and our progress. And later, Ryan will give an update on the number of shares that could be potentially tradable and how many we think actually would trade. But we wanted to do that a few days before the lockup period expired to give everyone a clear update as to where we are. We're right now, laser-focused on 2 things. First is the certification of this airline with the U.S. FAA under Part 121. And the second is the 2 aircraft that we will bring in November to complete the certification and start our revenue service and scheduled charters and charters starting -- once we're certified. Probably by mid-February, we'll be able to start operating those airplanes. Let's talk about the certification first and the goals that we achieve, both in the certification and in our aircraft fleet and fleet planning this month. So we are transitioning now to Phase III of the 5 phases of the FAA certification. We've made some minor changes to the manuals as requested by the FAA. Those have been resubmitted and will be approved. And now we've got all of our initial training programs for our pilots. Flight attendants, dispatchers have now been approved by the FAA and our training has been scheduled for mid-November for our pilots and mid-December for our flight attendants. So we are now actively interviewing captain candidates for our initial cadre to be brought on board by mid-November to start their training, and we will soon start the flight attendant recruitment and screening for their training, which will start in December. Additionally, we have to set up several stations in order for us to conduct our proving run flights, and we have started to set up our stations at Miami International, Atlantic City Airport and one further airport in Caribbean, which we'll set up probably in Santo Domingo. We're starting to set those up, hiring the people, setting up the stations and getting ready for our proving runs. So we are on track for our certification moving to Phase III, which is our formal design phase before we get into the proving runs. We're on track for that. Our training programs have been approved, and we're starting to screen our pilots and flight attendants. Let me talk about aircraft, which I know is a very important topic, especially for those who are Canada Jetlines shareholders previously. So our first aircraft is an A321. We've got it under excellent lease terms from Magnetic Leasing, and it is now currently in the Magnetic MRO in the Baltics, where there are some -- we'll show you pictures in a moment, but it's now just entered its C check. It's gone through all of its heavy checks. It's now entering its C check. All of the interior has been removed and has been completely refurbed, the sidewalls, lavatories, the seats are being recovered in leather. And those will be reinstalled in the next few weeks. And then we expect that, that airplane will go into the paint shop to have our livery applied on or about November 10. And that's a 2-week period, 10 days to 2 weeks, we'll have a time-lapse camera on the aircraft as it's being painted, and there'll be a live shot of that up on our website for everyone to watch an aircraft being painted. The aircraft is on schedule. We originally anticipated it bringing it over here to the U.S. for the FAA modifications that are required to operate under FAA standards, and to have the airplane painted here. We determined we could save money by keeping the airplane at Magnetic and having that work done there and having it painted there, so we're still on track. That airplane will be here early December, and that will be a big event for us, and we'll make sure that everyone has the link to the live camera that we'll have on it as we bring that airplane into Miami. Aircraft #2 is an A320, which we need for certification. We originally signed an LOI for that earlier this year. This aircraft because of the improvements that we have seen in the market more favorable to lessees, we renegotiated that lease and have gotten better terms -- even better terms than we had previously. That LOI will be approved by both boards next week, and then we'll announce that deal and that transaction just thereafter. This airplane was previously operated by a U.S. airline, which makes it much easier for us to put onto our certificate. Less work is required. It's already FAA standard conformed. And so it's a very, very good aircraft for us. It's a younger aircraft, well maintained, and it's got everything that we need in order to start operating as soon as we're certified. Again, that airplane will be painted and delivered to us, I am expecting mid-December, but just to ensure because of -- as we move the airplanes around for paint and for some other modifications, that airplane will be with us by the end of December. Both airplanes will be ready for their certification flying in January. So we're completely on track for our -- the 2 aircraft that are to be delivered to us. We've got 2 excellent ships that will be delivered to us. They will be in great condition and they're on great lease terms, very, very favorable to us as the lessee, and we'll have those airplanes for a number of years in our fleet. So we're very, very happy to have both of those airplanes. If you go to the next slide. Here's a picture of our A321 over in the Magnetic MRO in Estonia. We've had our people over. We've been crawling all over the airplane. We've had our inspectors there. We've had technical inspections done. This airplane is in great shape. It's now going through a C check. And if you see in the next page, next slide, you'll see that everything has been removed. The seats are being redone, refurbed. The sidewalls have been redone. The overhead bins have been redone, and this will be a great airplane for us once it's completed. It's on track to have all of its work done and to get its paint and to be delivered to us in early December. Ryan, I'll let you take over the...

So the next question is where are we going to fly it? So we've made some progress. We showed this month -- this slide about a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, the contracted has grown a little bit with some more clarity on our Cuba work. Our highly likely has grown as we've had a couple of casino clients move into what we would call highly likely. In negotiation, we've also increased the number that have gone past a bid phase into negotiation. Active bids are still robust, and prospects is continuing to grow. I would highlight that this is our passenger ACMI revenue pipeline, as we discussed -- as we announced last week, with the cargo project. That will be a separate pipeline from this, which we'll start bringing updates. We have had -- obviously, there's a lot of news made with that announcement that Ed will cover more, but we've had a number of people reach out to us about putting that plane to work pretty quickly once it's delivered. Going to the next slide. From the financing perspective, as we announced, we had warrants for 830,000 shares exercised with proceeds to GlobalX of USD 415,000. The vast majority of that was exercised by hybrid capital. We're pretty excited about their commitment to us going forward. They're very excited about the story. They're going to work closely with us and helping get the story out to various shareholders. We've also had -- Ed exercised some of his warrants in October, intends to exercise the balance that he has in November and December. And through other conversations, we expect more warrants to be exercised in the next -- before the end of the month, with shares to be held by what we would call long-term investors. As we highlighted earlier, on October 24, the whole period for the 6 million shares will be expiring. Most of those shares were purchased by insiders and long-term partners. In kind of conversations with them, we believe over 5.8 million of those are in for the long haul. They're here to see us get certified. They hear us to see us launch our cargo operations. They see sort of the blue sky potential of what we're trying to do. So we're pretty comfortable they'll be holding as well. So we encourage others to think about what we are developing and where we're going. And I think that story is resonating with quite a few of our investors. Ed, I will go back to the next slide. New initiatives.

Let's talk about the new initiatives. Again, let me say that we're laser-focused right now on the certification of the airline under FAA Part 121, and bringing in our first 2 passenger aircraft, the A321 and the A320. Beyond that, though, we need to start thinking about other initiatives because the planning time lines for a lot of initiatives in the aviation sector take a year or 2 years or even longer because of the complexity and the regulations and so forth. But we've made progress on a number of initiatives that are critical for us going forward. As Ryan mentioned and as you have seen, we signed a deal with Vallair, which is one of the prominent -- preeminent leasing companies now involved in the conversion of narrow-body aircraft to freighter. And they specialize now in the A321 conversion. So we actually have -- we acquired -- GlobalX acquired 4 A321s from Finnair, which we have moved over into this program. It will be a total of 10 aircraft that we will fly initially as freighters. As Ryan mentioned, we have talked with a number of parties to operate those airplanes for them. We will operate these airplanes on an ACMI basis, which means we just fly the airplane. The parties we contract with sell the space, fill up the space with their own cargo and we fly it for them. Some of the most prominent names who do require cargo aircraft in the U.S. have approached us because we now have 10 airplanes that we can provide a fleet. I can't mention those names, but you can figure out who they are. We've also assigned an LOI with a group in Colombia to provide one flight a day, Bogotá-Miami. They're one of the largest freight and logistics companies in Latin America. So we don't have any lack of confidence that we will find work for all 10 airplanes. This deal is actually cash neutral to us. And in fact, when the deal is done, it will generate cash for us from the aircraft transactions. So it's a very, very good deal for us. It puts us really on the map in terms of cargo, and it has allowed us to have discussions and negotiations to start with a number of big players in this business. Our pilots obviously can fly both the passenger and the cargo aircraft, and it's a very, very good business to be in. We have seen through the COVID crisis that the airlines that were able to diversify into cargo were able to do much better than the other airlines that were not able to do so. And so we'll have this diversity of revenue streams, which is very critical for us as we move forward. Another initiative is creating a permanent home for us here in South Florida, where we can have a hanger complex to do maintenance work on our aircraft and as well have simulators situated there and as well our headquarters office. We've looked at both Miami Airport and Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale has a great piece of real estate that they have now designated for us where we can develop a 90,000 square foot hanger that holds 3 A320s or even larger -- 1 larger aircraft, and we have already received some financing proposals to fund that development. But that will give us a permanent home here on one of the last pieces of real estate in any of the airports in South Florida. So it's important that we move on this initiative as fast as we can just because of the lack of real estate available at airports and our need for a permanent home. Other initiatives. We've talked about the spin-off of Canada Jetlines and our intent to do so. We've made a lot of progress on that. We will do this in the first and second quarters of next year. We are working with a number of owners of shells. We will conclude a deal on a shell in the next few weeks. We have a management team identified. We're now auditing the manuals that we got from the Canada Jetlines transaction to make sure that they're complete and see what else we need to do on those to make them ready for submission. We're evaluating sources of funding, and we've got a number of them that have approached us about doing this. And we're evaluating how best to distribute shares and the new entity to current shareholders. But this is accretive to shareholders because it's essentially a -- it would be -- hopefully, it should be a tax-free distribution of shares in a new entity, and we believe we have the funding in place to do that. This allows us to maximize the value of the assets that we acquired in the reverse takeover of the Canada Jetlines name reservation system and some of the other intellectual property that they have developed. And we think the time will be right in the -- early next year between the first and second quarters to launch this initiative. We think this is important for the company. Again, it monetizes and maximizes the value of those assets and gives us a place to put additional aircraft and grow this company even faster. So that's the initiative there. Lots of other things that are going on that are not right yet for us to brief. But in the background, I can tell you that we've got a number of other initiatives that we're looking at that maximize the opportunities that are being presented to us right now because of the COVID crisis particularly in terms of aircraft and other assets that we can acquire at very, very attractive prices because of this -- because of the current situation that the aviation sector is in. So again, let me stress, we are focused completely on certification. And the first 2 airplanes, those first 2 airplanes will be here in December. You'll see the first aircraft being painted as soon as it goes into the paint shop and I can assure you that we're doing everything we can to maximize the efficiency and the productivity of that aircraft by a number of initiatives we have ongoing to ensure both airplanes will be flown as soon as we are certified. We signed -- Ryan mentioned the pipeline of contracts a few moments ago. We have reached agreement. We will be flying the Miami-Havana route 7x a week, probably growing to 10x a week by the time we get started in revenue service. We have a number of contracts that are now in LOI, pending our certification, but we will be a major player in the Atlantic City market. We'll be a major player, we think, in the Las Vegas market. We'll be a major player, we believe, in the Bahamas and potentially in Jamaica. So all of our programs and departments are moving forward on all of their initiatives and we are preparing for a very successful launch of this airline in the first quarter of 2021. So with that, Grant, we'll take -- turn it over to you for any questions.

Thanks, Ed and Ryan. We'll give everybody a moment to send their questions, and we have a couple that have shown up already. Please remind me of the seating configuration for our first A321.

We've looked at a number of seating options for that. And we actually have developed several, what we call LOPAs, which are seating configuration, so that we can change the seating configuration quickly depending upon the needs of the client. The aircraft currently will come with 180 coach seats. We're now going to modify that and add 2 rows of business class seats based on some of the contracts that we already have in process. So we will have 8 business class seats and 180 coach seats in that airplane. The A320 is currently configured with 180 coach seats. We will probably take out 2 rows, that's a very, very tight configuration, and bring that down to 168 seats. We're working that out now with the owner of the aircraft because they'll pay for that reconfiguration. But we can add those seats back in if a client needed them on a sort of short-term basis. We could also add business class seats to that airplane if it's required by a client. But currently configured, the A321 will have 180 seats, all coach, and the A320 will have 168 seats.

Next question. Glad to see things are moving along and excited for the launch. What's the company doing to gain traction for the stock volume to gain a higher share price closer to the previous high for GlobalX was in excess of $3, and that happened very quickly after it started trading in late June. There was a lot of exuberance. And subsequent to that, everybody knows what the stock price is now in the sort of trading in the $0.85 to $0.95 range at the moment and in terms of what is being done. As I stated at the start of this update, this is the fifth update since late June. So there has been no lack of information, and each one shows that management is on track, hitting their stated targets and a heck of a lot has been accomplished in a very, very short period of time. I can also tell you that from our analytics that these management updates when we send out our blogs with links to the recording are getting between 500 and 700 views. So there's significant awareness. Obviously, we all want to see the stock price higher. But this is one of a number of initiatives. But yes, we would like to see the liquidity come up, and that's a major focus right now. I don't know, Ed and Ryan, if you want to add anything to that?

No, I think that's a good summary, Grant. So Howard Group is working very hard to get us in front of investors, both current investors, and we're doing, I think, a good job of that as well as prospective investors. It's frustrating for us to see the stock price lag, especially when we make what we think are very positive announcements about our progress. We just don't seem to be reaching people. Perhaps when the airplane goes into paint and people will see the GlobalX on the side of the aircraft, they'll believe that we're getting an aircraft. And all of those things that we said that we are doing, we are hitting our targets. But it's frustrating for us. But I guess, we need to take a look at perspective. This stock came out at in USD 0.25 and it's more than doubled over the last 4 months. So that's a positive. We think it probably should be higher. But it's just a matter we think of continuing the outreach efforts and getting our story out there, and hitting our targets and making progress on our business plan, particularly on our certification. But it's a focus of the management team. Let me say also that we have plenty of cash to get through the certification into the year with our GEM facility. I know that, that's an issue that seems to be holding some shareholders back. I thought that we had done a good job of addressing this, but I'll address it again. The GEM facility gives us all of the cash that we need to get certified and get our airplanes into the air. And so if there's any concern or questions about that, anyone on this call or any shareholder can call me or call Ryan, and we'll go through that line-by-line with them to assure them that we have the capital that's required to launch this airline. So with that, Grant -- Ryan, I don't know if you want to add anything?

No. I think you covered it.

Yes.

Okay. And just to add to that, it's a bit of a double-edged sword right now because we have general global skepticism about the airline industry because of COVID, and I don't have to get into it because all of those things are obvious. But at the same time, with Global Crossing being focused on charter and cargo and has been so well outlined by management, the types of deals that they're being offered for lease and/or purchase of aircraft is unbelievable. It's like a half-price sale. And people should be cognizant of that. But we're also aware that if you go back to the old Canada Jetlines days, there were 2 issues. One, the company never did take possession of an aircraft. This is contrary to that, where aircraft have been announced and now you're seeing pictures, and you're going to see much more shortly with going into the paint shop. So that's real. And the second part was the Canada Jetlines was unable to raise the $50 million or so that it required to begin flying as a scheduled carrier. The operations of Global Crossing are quite different and do not require anywhere near the amount of cash that Canada Jetlines required. So please take all of that into consideration. And I think we'll move on now. Next question...

Yes. I think there's one other point there, Grant, is Canada Jetlines never submitted one document to your version of the FAA, the CTA. We have submitted almost 100,000 pages of documents and manuals to the FAA, which have now gone through the process, and we're moving on to Phase III, and we're getting ready to train our pilots. So that's a significant difference from what Canada Jetlines was able to accomplish during their time, trying to get certified.

Next question. Are you able to provide the call signs at this time, so we can track the movements of the first 2 aircraft?

Yes. These aircraft will not be flown to the U.S. under our call signs because we are not a certified airline as of yet. Our call sign, we have several that are in front of FAA for approval. And as soon as all of that is completed, we'll, of course, put that out to everyone. But they will be flown under generic call signs to bring those 2 airplanes to the U.S. We will put out -- when that airplane is about to leave Eastern Europe for Miami, we'll put out a link, so that you can follow that -- the progress of that airplane as it's flown over the Atlantic and then down the eastern seaboard to Miami. So we'll make sure that everyone's got access to that link.

Thank you. This is in regards to the comments as outlined in the presentation or the note about being offered a prime piece of land, where you could build your facility including hanger. The question centers in and around the timing of a potential build, commissioning and approximately what it would cost. I don't know if you can address those things yet, but that's the question.

Yes. I can address all of those in detail. So to build a hanger facility on a major airport in the U.S., from the time that we signed the land lease with the airport authority, which will probably be in 60 days, it will take us 9 months to get all of the permits and approvals to build, and it will take a year from there to get everything finalized and actually build the facility. So that's why we're starting today even well before we are certified, starting on the process of planning and building our hanger because it will take 2 years to get through that process. There are a lot of things that we have to do in the U.S. in terms of environmental studies and permits and approvals that lengthen that period of time. But we want to get started on that. We have started on that. We have the land identified. We already have several financing proposals for us to build that facility. And depending upon the configuration of the facility, if it's just a fewer hanger with some offices, it will run us about $22 million. If we add some simulator buildings and some additional office space there and consolidate all of our operations in that one piece of property, it could run us up perhaps to $28 million or $29 million. But given the lack of hanger capacity, hanger space here in South Florida and Miami and Fort Lauderdale, and as well anywhere else that we may want to put this airline, the ability to have our own hanger will save us money in the short and the long term as we take care of our own maintenance needs. So longer term, this facility saves us money, and we need a permanent facility to perform the heavy maintenance that needs to be performed on these airplanes that will start several years from now, just about the time that this facility is opened.

Thank you. I'm going to apologize to some of the people who've sent in questions because we're getting short on time, and there's a lot of questions suddenly, so some of these are not going to get addressed.

Grant, we'll stay as long as there's a question. We'll be here. We'll answer every question.

Okay. Next one is in regards to the comments about the spin-out of the Canada Jetlines and individual looking for an explanation of what is a shell company.

Ryan, do you want to take that?

Yes. A shell company would be a company that's publicly traded that doesn't necessarily have an active operation behind it. So the idea being we would plug our active operation into an existing publicly traded company. That's effectively it.

Shell's trade for -- a shell, like the one we're talking about.

Shells trade for anywhere depending on -- anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 in cash or shares. So effectively, it's just kind of the similar transaction as to what Global did with Jetlines, whereas Jetlines was more of an active company, but it's the same kind of transaction. So the idea of being you would get a share in the new -- in the other existing public company when the transaction is finished. And it would trade under its own symbol, and have its own management team and similar aspects.

It would have to be majority Canadian owned. And we've been approached by a number of potential investors who are very interested in that. So GlobalX itself. As the U.S. shareholders in GlobalX can only own 25% of that, the balance will be owned by Canadian shareholders. And all shareholders in GlobalX currently would receive probably a like number of shares in the new Canada Jetlines.

Proportionately, yes.

Next question. Have the 4 A321s all been acquired by GlobalX already? And would it be accurate to say that they will then be involved in a sale-leaseback arrangement with the latter?

They have -- they're -- we're just finishing our inspections. We have signed the initial documents and put up a deposit. We anticipate this transaction going through. Those 4 airplanes will then be sold to Vallair in a sale-leaseback. Vallair will oversee the conversion of those aircraft to freighter. There may be a period of time where we operate 2 of those airplanes as passenger aircraft until the conversion slots are ready for them -- for those 2 aircraft, which would help us tremendously next summer. But yes, those 4 aircraft are being acquired by GlobalX and then sold to Vallair in a sale-leaseback transaction.

I believe this next one is already underway, but the question is, when will you start to hire pilots?

That process has started. We've hired the first 2 who will be part of the initial cadre. They will actually be the 2 pilots who will go over to Estonia to pick up our A321 and fly it to Miami. We are sorting through and interviewing. I would guess we have several hundred resumes of pilots. We are focused on captains with piloting command time of over 6,000 hours, who are current and qualified on the A320 and have also been involved in training. So training captains from other airlines are very high on our list. And we think that they'll make up the bulk of the initial cadre class of captains that we will hire in the first 2 classes. So that process is well underway, and we pretty much identified the individuals who will make up our first class of captains to go through our training program.

Next question is in relation to funding. Are you still in touch with some of the banks who wanted to fund you a couple of months ago?

Ryan, do you want to take that?

Yes. I think that's -- it's an ongoing conversation. They're obviously following. I'm guessing some of them are on this. There's various levels of interest and we maintain conversations with them and more as I think with the announcement of the cargo planes, it kind of sourced out a couple that reached out to us pretty quickly. So we're pretty excited about their level of interest and our ability to move forward with them.

We believe -- okay, we believe that we will be able to do a secondary offering of our shares in the first quarter of 2021 of a significant amount that will ensure that we've got plenty of capital to execute our plan up through the first 15 to 20 aircraft. We have gotten significant interest from middle market investment banks who understand our story, have come to see us in Miami and have made initial proposals to us for a secondary offering. So we are quite confident that we have, not only with the GEM facility, but with the potential secondary offering, to have all of the capital that's required for us to execute up to a 20-aircraft fleet at GlobalX.

Thank you. And just a side note without getting into anything else. Anyone attending today or may listen to this recording, you should just think that this is going to become very much a U.S.-focused public company. So read into that what you will. The next question. Addressing efficiency, what do you anticipate the employee to aircraft ratio to be? Also, how much lower with cargo operations?

That's -- employee to aircraft ratio is a common metric in mature airlines that provide most of their functions in-house, including maintenance, ground operations and so forth. So it's not -- I can't give you an apples-to-oranges comparison. And the number that I will give you will seem very, very low because of the fact that most of our maintenance, almost all of our maintenance will be outsourced to Spirit Airlines and some other maintenance providers. And our ground handling and passenger terminal operations are also outsourced. So -- but as a rule of thumb with pilots and flight attendants, we have 4 crews of pilots, which are 8 pilots and 5 crews, 4 flight attendants who are 20. So 28 to 30 employees who are cabin crew per airplane. Our headquarter staff will be very, very lean. We're now at about 15 people who won't get much higher than that even as we get to 10 or 15 airplanes. We will operate very, very lean and very, very efficiently. Our maintenance will be outsourced. Our terminal operations and ground handling will be outsourced. So I cannot give you numbers for that. A good airline should be operating at about 70 to 80 employees per aircraft, assuming that they handle all of those functions in-house. We will outsource, again, maintenance and terminal operations and some other functions. And so we will be probably at 40 to 45 employees per aircraft with the outsourcing. And that's as lean as we can probably get. As we get additional aircraft, that 45 number will probably come down to 37 or 38, but we will be very, very lean and very, very efficient. We have no executive assistants. We have no secretaries. Everybody takes their own phone calls. Everyone takes their own garbage out to the dumpster at the end of the day. We are a low, low cost airline, and we will continue to do so.

Speaking of low cost. The next question is in relation to an expectation that Global Crossing is going to be selling tickets. But I don't believe that's going to happen, but that is in relation to the question. When are you going to start to sell tickets?

Well, we are -- initially, we'll be what we call an ACMI charter airline. So we fly for others. They sell the tickets. They handle all of the ticket sales, they handle all of the processing at the airport and so forth. We just fly the airplane. In certain situations, as we look at Canada to the U.S. operations and even some U.S. to Cuba operations, we may fly those flights under our own flag, in which case, we are looking at the reservation system and other assets that we would need to do that. But we would outsource a lot of the sale of the tickets to travel agents, tour operators and others, while we maintain control of the -- of all of the revenue plus maintain control of the flight and the scheduling. So 2-part answer. Initially, we will not sell tickets. Then as we expand our operation and decide to provide basically our own demand for charters by creating charters ourselves, we will have a reservation system, but most of that will be distributed through the tour operator and travel agent networks in both Canada and the U.S.

Next question is in relation to the FAA. What is the nature of concerns or feedback being received from the FAA in the submission process?

No concerns. We've gone back and forth on a few items in our maintenance manuals for clarification. Those have been -- those changes have been made and resubmitted. All of our training programs, as I said earlier, have been approved by the FAA. So we are clear to start training our people whenever we want. At this point, there are no concerns from the FAA. I think that they would say, I'm not putting words in their mouth, but having done this a number of times, I think that they would say that this is a normal certification. They are very impressed with our team. They like the way we operate, they like our aircraft, they like the way we approach the safety aspects of this business. They like the way we approach the training aspects of this business. We have a very, very healthy relationship with the national team from the FAA. And very soon, we will be assigned the inspectors from the local FAA office who will start working with us and so we think that we've made great progress. We're on track, great relationship with the FAA, and we've got a great set of manuals and documents that we need to run this airline.

Okay. We have a couple of questions dealing with marketing, but it's in relation to stock market activity, which we've already addressed. So I'm going to move on to the last question. Are you able to hedge fuel prices at this time with favorable market conditions?

Ryan, do you want to take it?

Well, I think that's -- the thing with fuel prices is we don't pay fuel. So on an ACMI basis, which is aircraft crew, maintenance and insurance, fuel is generally a cost of the customer, not ours. So I think one of the things people when they want to figure out the difference between us and a scheduled airline, they go [ in Carson, Western and ] Air Canada, where fuel and hedging and all those aspects are very important aspects of their business. Generally, with our case, fuel is a pass-through. We rarely take, if ever, fuel risk when we do any of our contracts. So there isn't really a need or a necessity to hedge fuel. Now if customers want to because we have a defined demand, that is something we can do on their behalf, but we wouldn't assume any risk there. So there's no real need to do it.

It's a good comment. And again, this is just one of many differentiators with Global Crossing and in terms of economic advantages that it's going to enjoy. Again, one of many. With that, Ed and Ryan, thank you. And thanks to all those who attended. And we'll see you in a month.

Thanks everyone.

Yes. Thanks.