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

August 4, 2021

Cboe Canada CA Industrials Passenger Airlines special 51 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Grant Howard

attendee
#1

Good afternoon, everyone. We're just allowing more of the participants and attendees in right now, but we're going to get started because everybody will be here in a moment. First off, to Ed Wegel, the CEO, and the team, Ryan Goepel, Mark Salvador, congratulations on getting the FAA Aircraft Operating Certificate. You've been working hard. I don't think any of us have a true appreciation of how much goes into this. So congratulations on that. There's a lot you're going to be talking about in this webinar. So I'm going to turn it over to you so we can cover a lot of ground. I anticipate there will be a fair number of questions, and we'll chat more about that later. Now Ed Wegel, CEO, Global Crossing Airlines.

Edward Wegel

executive
#2

Great. Thanks, Grant. Good afternoon, good morning, everyone. We're very happy to be here to give you our update as of the end of July, first part of August. We're going to go, as Grant said, through a number of items today. If you go to the agenda. We're going to talk about our certification, both with the FAA and an update -- current update from the DOT as of today. We'll go through a listing of our current and pending contracts to fly charters and the progress that we've made there, some of our marketing initiatives, including Flugy. Talk a little bit about the growth in staffing at the company and how we're growing our human capital. Update on Jetlines, which I know everyone is very interested to see where we are in that progression. Talk about our cargo plans, Atlantic City, which we launched earlier this week, development of our new headquarters and maintenance facility, and then we'll take, as usual, a number of questions. So if we -- let's get right into it. We'll talk about the certifications. As Grant said, we received our AOC, our Air Operating Certificate, U.S. 121 flag carrier from the FAA in a ceremony here at the headquarters yesterday. We received the final order from the DOT just about 2 hours ago. There were no objections to us being a certified airline in the U.S. The final order was issued today. We're getting some more documents to DOT on our operations' specifications and some other administrative items, and we expect full operating authority to be issued later today or, first thing, tomorrow morning. We've started the process of the presidential review to get our international charter authority, and we expect to have that within the next short while. It takes a few days to go through the process with that. That allows us to operate internationally. And again, we'll have that quite soon. We expect to start flying charters very soon after we receive the final authority tomorrow. A number of people who already called to see if they could be the first ones to fly with us. So we think that, that will go fairly quickly, and we'll be in the air very shortly. Just to talk a little bit about our current and pending updates on our contracts that we've signed, again, we made significant progress on this, and I'll turn it over to our Chief Marketing Officer, Mark Salvador to discuss.

Mark Salvador

executive
#3

Sure. Thanks, Ed. As Ed mentioned, we have a significant number of charter contracts in our first year of operation. Those contracts are reflective of ad hoc charters as well as scheduled charter types, charter routes on behalf of clients. For our domestic operations, where we'll start our operations right after the approval process is complete. We have ad hoc charter scheduled from over 28 airports in the United States, including some major airports, Newark, Pittsburgh, Dallas/Fort Worth and the like. Those are all starting middle of August. We'll show you some numbers here shortly that show our forecast from the middle part of August as we move into the balance of the rest of the year. Additionally, once we have that international certification presidential authority that I spoke of. We will start to fly some charter routes to the Caribbean. We have currently under charter contracts in place between Miami and Punta Cana, 6 times per week and then also Miami and Santo Domingo with additional 4 days per week. And then after 90 days, we increase the frequency on those rotations. Miami and Cancún, we'll be doing 4 times per week and then subject to government approvals and the reopening of charter flights in earnest into Cuba, we will be flying Miami, Havana 7 days per week as well as Tampa and Havana 4 days per week. All of those, again, pending for borders reopening in earnest and the government approval to fund those flights. Next slide, please. So what you'll see here is the grid that we had shown in the past. It talks about our contracted hours per month as well as those hours that are in our quote database that we expect to go to contract. So we have, for a half month in August, you'll see that we have 278 hours contracted, and we have another 105 out for quote that we feel that we'll go to contract this month for a total of 384. You'll see that in September, that number goes to 303, all the way up into the high 5s and beyond for the balance of the year. You'll see that as we start to add additional aircraft, those aircraft are really coming in at the perfect time to the contracts that we have presold, and that's how Ryan and Ed have structured the aircraft deals to come into our fleet. Next slide. Our charter sales team works across several verticals. Some of those are new brokerage companies that bring us business, others are through clients that we go out and source directly. Currently, we're working with 28 different brokerages and 15 direct clients in our contracts database, and we are currently pursuing additional direct clients to round out that number for more directly sourced business. We're currently working with either contracted or in the co-process with airlines, travel agencies, incentive groups, casino resorts, Caribbean destinations, public charter operators, university and college athletic departments and U.S. government. So what you'll see here is that in our direct sales efforts, we are focused on having a large number of verticals so that we're not fully dependent on one type of business. Next.

Edward Wegel

executive
#4

Okay. You want to speak about Flugy.

Mark Salvador

executive
#5

Okay. So you all have noticed in some previous press releases or with our previous updates that we invested in a company called we -- GlobalX controls Flugy. Flugy is a crowd-sourced charter application that we believe very strongly will be game changer, as it relates to on-demand charter opportunities for groups of like-minded individuals. Where the platform works is that people will join the Flugy platform, and they will start to show interest in various hard-to-reach, one of a kind of iconic Instagramable destinations that are typically considered very difficult to get to through scheduled charter, either -- I'm sorry, scheduled air, either because there are multiple stops or long layovers to get to these destinations. And what Flugy does is Flugy solves that problem by doing point-to-point charter with a group of like-minded individuals. We have engaged GlueIQ, which is a leading strategy and marketing company to help us with the go-to-market strategy, including the marketing plans, the marketing research, the product road map and all the media resources that we will need to align in order to launch the product. They -- if you do any research on GlueIQ, they work with some very major travel as well as consumer brand companies. They work with Atlantis Paradise Island, work on Norwegian Cruises, for example, and even in consumer goods and subscription programs such as Jenny Craig. We're currently in the technology finalization phase. So we are taking all of the technology that we acquired, and we're stabilizing it and upgrading it to the most modern technology platforms and integrations and then also making sure that all of those integrations work with the systems that we have invested with GlobalX. Our plan is to use Flugy drive incremental charter time and charter revenue on our own aircraft, while they'll be operated as independent websites. What will happen is once Flugy charter is confirmed, those charter clients will then be handed off to GlobalX for booking on that charter. So as that client has the -- feels that they're booking with an airline directly, that their funds are secured, and it gives them a sense of security that they are working directly with a U.S. 121 airline versus a tour operator. So it's -- we're making sure that all of those connections between the website and our booking engines, and the technologies are solid and secure. We're currently looking at several strategic partners who have approached us as well as investors, who are very interested in this post-pandemic new way of sourcing travel for like-minded individuals. And what will happen, as Ed previously mentioned in earlier investor conferences, is that GlobalX will bring on additional investors to launch the product and then post-launch some additional equity investment, but at the same time, still maintain a significant equity stake in controlling interest in Flugy. And we expect to be announcing our initial destination charters in September of this year.

Edward Wegel

executive
#6

Okay. All right. So let's move on and talk about our investment in our human capital, which is increasingly important to us. As we grow, we're currently at 2 airplanes with 2 more airplanes coming on stream in late September, October. So we have to staff up prior to that for training, for recruiting, hiring and training purposes. Right now, in August, we're at about 121 team members. We view that against the number of airplanes that we operate. So we're assuming 4 airplanes. We're about 30 employees per aircraft, which, when we benchmark where we should be at this point, is exactly where we should be. As we talked about, and we'll talk about it in a few minutes again, we opened up our Atlantic City base this week with 15 flight attendants. They've started training. We started a new pilot class yesterday with 4 pilots, and we'll continue to do these smaller classes time to when we take airplanes. As we take airplanes also, we need to increase our maintenance staff, some of our administrative functions and so forth. So we're right where we need to be, right now, in terms of our cabin crew, both cockpit crew and in-flight crew members. We're right where we should be in terms of our maintenance staffing to fulfill our FAA requirements. And on the administrative side, we try to maintain a lean posture there. But as we continue to grow the numbers of our team members will grow. And again, we're right at about 121 employees' team members right now, right where we should be. I'll let our CFO talk about the Jetlines update. Ryan has done a tremendous job getting Canada Jetlines organized and ready to launch. And so I'll let him take it from here.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#7

Yes, Canada Jetlines, we completed the spin-off in June 28 of last month -- or in June, sorry. Most of the shareholders should have received their shares and probably see some weird-numbered company in their accounts. Those relate to the Canada Jetlines shares. In order to fund the operation, we've closed out -- we're closing on an initial financing, should be done in the next couple of days. It's 30% oversubscribed. So there was a ton of interest. We're very excited about the support that we receive there. We continue to build up the management team. Pretty much all key post holders, positions are filled, and they are working hard on the certification process. We signed an LOI for the first plane, MSN 3831, a 2009-built aircraft designed for delivery in late Q4. We have submitted our citizenship and financial fitness applications to the CTA, which is a critical step in the regulatory process. We expect approval from that very soon imminently. Once received, the manuals will be submitted. They're effectively 90% done. There's a number of manuals that can go in today once that approval is received. And then we'll be targeting a direct listing on either the TSX or NEO by mid-October, November. I think those exchanges are pretty backed up. They say they take about 8 to 12 weeks in order for a listing application to work. But that process has started. So hopefully, we'll get these shares trading that you received in the very near future.

Edward Wegel

executive
#8

Yes, I think it's important to emphasize that we say here we're 30% oversubscribed. I think we probably could have been 100% to 150% oversubscribed on this. There was such intense interest building on what we've done here at GlobalX in terms of our certification and getting airplanes ready to fly. There's still a lot of great synergy between the 2 companies. GlobalX will probably fly some initial charter flights for Canada Jetlines. This coming winter, December and January, it maybe into February, while they get their first airlines up and running. And then we'll have an interchange of airplanes, so we can fly for them, they can fly for GlobalX during certain times of the year when either us or Jetlines needs additional capacity, additional lift. So though this really is fulfilling our vision that we had 18 months ago to create 2 airlines out of the 1 entity, and it's come to fruition. Great management team there at Jetlines that we've recruited. A great world-class Board of Canadian business and political heavyweights. And I think we have given Jetlines a maximum chance, opportunity for success, as we get it listed on the TSX or the NEO and then continue to raise money. Game plan very much like we did here at GlobalX in the way we're approaching this business and the way the management team of their is approaching it. And so we're very pleased with where we are, and we want to get these shares trading so that all of the GlobalX shareholders who've got 1 share for every 2 shares in GlobalX will have this added dividend in their portfolios. A brief update on cargo. We continue to build out our operating plan, still looking for first scheduled delivery late December, early January, depending upon how quickly the conversion can be done on our first aircraft. As we briefed before, we have all of the manuals and documentation prepared and ready to submit to the FAA here in the next 60 days, once we finalize the delivery date for that first airplane. But we've got all of the certification work on our side has been completed. We'll submit that to the FAA later this year in concert with the delivery of the first aircraft, and we hope and expect to be flying 321 freighters in the first quarter of 2022. We will sign a lease agreement for our second A321, probably early next week with ST Leasing. That airplane will be delivered sometime the second quarter of next year, perhaps into the third quarter, depending upon delivery schedules. And within the next 1 week to 10 days, we'll sign an agreement for 2 more A321s with Greenwich Highland and Leasing. These will be converted at the Precision facility here in Florida. So it'll be very close to home and very good conversion process for those. So we're very pleased with where we are on the cargo side. This again diversifies our revenue streams, gives us both passenger and cargo. We are the only narrow-body airbus platform in the U.S. that can fly the 321 freighter. So we feel we're in a very, very good position. So our discussions continue with all of the major package carriers, we've been in touch with or they've been in touch with us. Several Latin American-based national airlines have been in touch with us to operate a narrow-body freighter for them, to complement their wide-body freighters. And we continue to talk to U.S.-based logistics companies that need additional air cargo capacity. So we have no doubt that our airplanes will be fully booked, and we continue to look and source 321s to be converted to freighter, and we'll grow that fleet continually over the next 3 to 5 years. Let's talk a little bit about Atlantic City. I was in Atlantic City. On Monday this week, we launched our regional base with the class of 14, locally hired flight attendants. We have a partnership with the Atlantic County Economic, the Workforce Development and the Economic Development Association. They are actually paying 3/4 or 75% of the salaries of our initial flight attendants for their first 6 months of employment with us. They've also purchased through the funds that they maintain and have control over. They have purchased most of our training equipment that we need for the base and we're looking to expand that partnership now with additional grants from both county and the federal government to expand our workforce at Atlantic City. We will deliver to Atlantic City, an aircraft sometime in October to support our operations there. And the primary reason, again, why we looked at Atlantic City and chose it is because of its location, gives us a maximum opportunity to bid and be competitive for charter contracts that operate out of the Northeast, Philadelphia, Newark, JFK, Boston and even out into the Midwest. Having an airplane in Atlantic City makes us competitive. We don't have to ferry the airplane from Miami, which cuts as much as 5 or 6 hours a ferry time off of the quote that makes us competitive. So in fact because of our ability to say that we have an aircraft in Atlantic City and how we price and quote charters in the Northeast, we signed a little over 200,000 in Atlantic City originating contract, so the client will leave from Atlantic City. We have other charters where the Atlantic city-based aircraft will move within the Northeast to pick up charter clients. It's just under $1 million has already been signed in a short period of time. And we've got active quotes for another $600,000 or so through the year-end of 2022, and that's growing every day. We will probably base 2 airplanes in Atlantic City by the early part of next year. And that will make us very, very competitive in 2022 in competing and quoting various charter contracts and RFPs. We're starting to look at a base that we will put out West. The Western U.S., we're looking at Phoenix, Las Vegas, perhaps Salt Lake City. We've just started to do our work on that. and we hope and expect to name our western base of operations within the next 60 days. But Atlantic City so far, it looks like a big win for us. great partnership with the state, great partnership with Atlantic County and Atlantic City. They're picking up a lot of our costs in the beginning phases of this, and we're already picking up a lot of business that we would not have gotten, had we had to bid the business flying from Miami. So this is a good model for us, and we'll replicate this as we open a base in the Western U.S. sometime in 2022. As we expand, we need to, obviously, look at all of our real estate, and we need to have a maintenance facility where we can bring a lot of our maintenance activities in-house. Within the next 18 months or so, we'll have to start doing C checks on our airplanes. We want to do as much of that work in-house as possible, and so we're starting the plan for our new headquarters in a maintenance facility. We have found a great piece of land in working with Fort Lauderdale Airport Broward County. They've started the process of leasing that land to us. We have found a financing source, essentially a spin-off from a major Wall Street bank is going to be funding our development of our headquarters and our maintenance facility. We will build a maintenance facility that can hold 3 A320s or 1 A330 as we look to expand into wide-bodies. We'll have plenty of ramp parking for our aircraft that need to undergo maintenance and plenty of parking and office space for our headquarters. So we are starting to get deeply serious about this. We have the funding in place. It will be about a $30 million development, when all is said and done on this. It will take us about 2 years to complete, but we need to get started now because by -- within 2 years, we'll be at 15, perhaps as many as 20 airplanes, including freighters. And we need to have a place that we can call home and have a place that we can maintain our aircraft. So this is a site plan at Fort Lauderdale Airport on the southwest side of the airport, right off of 95, great access, a great piece of land that they have given us. Nest Slide. This is what the sort of line drawing looks like, a hanger for the 3 A320s or 1 A330 ramp parking. And then we have some room for some simulator base, if we decide to put some simulators there at the facility as well as office space to handle all of our corporate staff slide. Next slide. That gives you a better sense of where this is on the airport. We think this will be a great home for us. And again, it will take us about 2 years to get through all of the permitting and approvals and get the facility built. One more slide, that's what it will look like. And we're very, very excited and anxious to get started on this project. It will give us the ability to put signage up and really give us a strong presence here in South Florida. It's to go along with our presence in Atlantic City, where we will also build a hanger, a maintenance facility, but it will be much smaller than this it will be able to hold 1 A320 for our operations up in the Northeast. So with that -- just one final slide. with that -- that concludes our presentation for today. We're very, very pleased that we are now through the certification process and don't have to discuss that anymore. We'll be through with DOT here shortly, full authority U.S. 121 flag carrier with the ability to also operate with supplemental. We will be doing our certification to be able to fly with North Atlantic, so we can fly from the U.S. to Europe. That will be done within the next month or so. And so everything now is falling into place. We need now to execute on deliveries of aircraft, signing contracts and making our clients happy. And I think we've gone a long way in putting all of those pieces in place to maximize our success here with GlobalX. I think the Canada Jetlines spin-off is just a tremendous opportunity for our shareholders and our employees and as well for the 2 companies to work very closely together to jointly develop the North American and Caribbean and South American charter markets, both the Sun destinations and with charter clients across the Americas. So I think our future is very bright. We've got a great platform and a foundation that's been established here and we are ready to fly. So with that, Grant, I'll turn it back to you, and we'll take some questions.

Grant Howard

attendee
#9

Thank you, gentlemen. Well done. And again, congratulations. It's a very bright-looking future here. [Operator Instructions] We've got a few already, so I'm going to start. Ryan, there's a question here, from somebody who missed the beginning of the webinar. A retail investor was interested in subscribing for the Jetlines financing. Obviously, he missed that part of the discussion, perhaps for the edification of any other people who might have missed that. Can you just recap the fact that you're oversubscribed?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#10

Yes. We were significantly oversubscribed. We had to cut it off. We're working to get it closed. There's a lot of administrative aspects that are in process to finalize it. And so it's closed, is effectively where that is. But we will be looking for continued support of the stock as we go to get it listed, as we think this is a fantastic opportunity and those who get in, I think, when we get it listed, I think that's the next real opportunity to invest.

Grant Howard

attendee
#11

There's a question here. What are the current total number of shares outstanding? But I'm not sure if that's a question in relation to Global Crossing or Canada Jetlines, post financing, because it wasn't clarified here.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#12

Well, so in Canada -- in Global Crossing, there's about 20 million common shares, 24 million class Jet B shares and about 5 million Class A shares, which are -- so that's the whole structure for Global Crossing. Prefinancing, because we haven't announced the final number, when we initiated the financing, it was about 33 million issued shares for Jetlines -- sorry, for Canada Jetlines, it was 33 million issued shares, 38 million fully diluted.

Grant Howard

attendee
#13

Thank you. Last presentation, it was discussed about a plan to reach new investors. Where are we with this? And what role does Sapwater have in it?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#14

I think we've engaged in a number of platforms. We're working with different -- with Howard Group, obviously. We're working with a number of other platforms in order to target and reach more investors. Now that we're going to be going into revenue service. I think it opens the door to significantly different types of investors, namely institutional investors, which is who we're targeting. And we believe we're one of the -- probably the only growth stories, small-cap growth stories in transportation that exist in North America. And so we are basically using that method to that story and doing direct hands on reaching out to the various investor groups that are a pretty broad in diversity of the U.S. and Canada.

Grant Howard

attendee
#15

It definitely will be expanding. What P&L financial information will be posted on your website in the future?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#16

Everything that's required. I think as we get into revenue service, obviously, the earnings releases will become much more material. We will be releasing Q2 results very soon. It's just going through audit review. Again, that's pre-revenue. So it's kind of -- it's not as interesting. I think when we get through the end of Q3, it will obviously have revenue, and we will look to revamp the investor website to kind of reflect historical margins and a lot more metrics that you would see with other operating carriers.

Grant Howard

attendee
#17

Thank you. How would you characterize your ability to compete for business?

Edward Wegel

executive
#18

Well, I think we just put that up on the screen. We are basically sold out for the first 4 airplanes. So I think that shows we can be competitive in the space. We just concluded, for instance, another meeting with a very, very large charter broker that wants to move all of their business to us. And we continue to see revenue opportunities every day. We've just -- every day, we must bid on anywhere between 8 to 10 contracts, and we're winning more than our fair share of those contracts. So we don't see any impediments to our ability to compete with these airplanes and with the crew members and the team that we have.

Grant Howard

attendee
#19

As I say, the proof is in the pudding, and that was very clear in the presentation. It was mentioned that in 2 to 3 years, Global could be flying 15 to 20 aircraft. The cargo plan for calendar year '23 was discussed. What is the plan next calendar year for adding passenger aircraft? Also, could Ed or Ryan comment on limitations to growth capital market demand, ramp-up of new aircraft, et cetera?

Edward Wegel

executive
#20

So we will seek to add at least 1 passenger aircraft per quarter. We expect to be at 6 passenger aircraft by first quarter of 2022. So we're targeting 10 passenger airplanes in the year by the end -- by year-end 2022. We will take, at this point, looks like 4 A321 freighters during the course of 2022, into early 2023. So we could be at 14 airplanes by the end of 2022. That's a combination of passenger and cargo. We would add another 4 to 6 freighter aircraft in 2023, plus 4 passenger aircraft. So that would bring us to 25 airplanes at the end of 2023.

Grant Howard

attendee
#21

I'm going to combine, it looks like a series of questions here in regards to the Global Crossing fee shares and the common shares. So I'll go through these in parts and then maybe you can just answer them all, at once, Ryan. Why is it that we can't convert economic right shares and a TFSA, tax-free savings account or registered retirement savings account? Somebody was asking about a deadline for the Jet B conversion to Jet. And a couple of questions here as to your perspective on why there is a price difference between the Jet and the Jet Bs. So let's table that first.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#22

Right. So yes, and I know we've had a lot of questions about this a lot over the last month, and I understand you have the frustration in trying to understand why there is a gap. Obviously, from our perspective, we think that shares should be traded pretty close to the same value, given they have the same economic rights through the 2. To answer some of them really quickly. TSFA, I don't know the answer to that. I think that's a question for your broker or adviser. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on what can and can't transfer there. As far as conversion deadline, there is no real deadline set up to do such. We are subject to the 25% cap in order to remain compliant with DOT. But I think why there's a gap, I think, is really -- it's supply and demand. If you think about the majority of the owners of Jet are the U.S. investors, the vast majority are insiders, very few of us are selling. Most of us are actually acquiring.

Edward Wegel

executive
#23

None of us are selling.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#24

None of us are selling. Yes. None of us are selling. We're acquiring. So there's a limited amount of shares for sale, and I think the shares for sale that are happening are in the Jet Bs, and that's where people are selling, which is -- and there's not as much demand for the Jet Bs for some reason. I think from -- as an opportunity -- the Jet B should be worth pretty much the same as the commons, that's what we where we feel. And so we think there's an opportunity for people to buy shares at a discount. And the Jet B. I think longer term, as we grow our investor base, grow our U.S. investor base, this split will cease to be required, and we will actively be manage that as we move -- as we continue to grow our U.S. investor base. I think when you look at how many retail U.S. investors we had in October, it's effectively tripled since then. So we continue our outreach throughout the U.S. So I think on the long term, we see them being worth the same. I think it's -- there's a near-term kind of disconnect that's occurring, and that's more supply-demand. And we're basically working to address that through either finding U.S. buyers. I think there's a lot of U.S. buyers out there buying Jet Bs because they see the opportunity. And I think the 2, in the long term, should come to the same value.

Grant Howard

attendee
#25

For those folks who are still trying to figure all this out, and I'm not saying this is going to happen, but if you presume that Global Crossing is going to be on NASDAQ one day, if not too far down the road, and there will be 1 class of share, would you buy something at CAD 2.40 where there's a spread of maybe $0.80, $0.90, $1, it could be a heck of an arbitrage opportunity. Just saying. Next, how do you see the competitive environment in Canada spooling up over the next few years? And I presume that's in relation to Canada Jetlines?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#26

Well, I guess, obviously, in Canada, and we also have a Jetlines team that we could bring in when we start doing Jetlines presentations that will be better suited to kind of really address it. But if you look at the competitive landscape in Canada, most of the operators there have really struggled through COVID, have significant debt that they've incurred. We believe the same story we've been telling here, we're going to merge, post-COVID -- with post-COVID pricing and no debt. And we think that's going to make us cost competitive. And if you're cost competitive in Canada, it's demonstrated to be successful. So I think we're working hard with our distribution. We're working hard with our management team to ensure there's a market for us to sell the share, sell the seats, as they become available and put together a strong team with a very cost-effective airline. And I think with that, we think we can compete with anyone out there.

Grant Howard

attendee
#27

An individual has missed the front end of the webinar but is interested, I guess, on the bigger picture for Canada Jetlines, and asking what are the big targets for Canada Jetlines? And I'm sure you'll get into this more when we actually have a Canada Jetlines webinar.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#28

And that -- I think that would be the answer. I think the answer is to grow that opportunity similar as we did here. You start with 2, and you start adding clients until you get to 10 to 20, is kind of the near-term goal for that operation. And I think we will have these similar updates with the management team from Jetlines who are working hard to deliver on that plan for us.

Grant Howard

attendee
#29

With the recent uptick in flight cancellations and continued struggles with several competing airlines, is there any discussion in picking up that extra work?

Edward Wegel

executive
#30

Yes. Let me answer that. There have been some recent issues with 2 major U.S. airlines. That's a short-term blip. They will sort that out, I think, fairly quickly. Even if we had the aircraft that we could offer to them today, we probably would not get that business. They won't go outside of their own resources to fix their current issues. I do think it shows that there is an opportunity for pure charter airlines or scheduled charter airlines to put service into destinations, that were the major -- the major U.S. carriers when they do stub their toe, we would be able to pick up market share, but that would be distinct from assisting those airlines with their problems. Again, they will fix those in-house. Our ability to deploy aircraft and crew very efficiently and very opportunistically though, bodes well for our future, there will continue to be these sorts of hiccups, whether with these 2 airlines or other airlines across the system. So we are always additional or supplemental lift. A lot of supplemental lift is needed right now in the U.S., and we intend to take advantage of that situation and offer everything that we have to anyone out there who wants to fly. And so forth, that strategy has been very successful. And frankly, we don't have that much aircraft time that we can offer right now. It's tightly booked we could use 2 more airplanes as soon as we could get them.

Grant Howard

attendee
#31

More questions in regards to a NASDAQ listing for Global. I think the only new aspect here might be in regards to timing, if you want to discuss that at all?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#32

I think with respect to timing, it's an application process. We're obviously looking and ensuring. We need the criteria, we do, as of now, we need the criteria for what would allow for NASDAQ listing. The question is what makes the most sense and when can we get it done by. NASDAQ, like everything else is incredibly backed up with number of large offerings, but that work is in process, and we'll get an update on that probably in the next update.

Grant Howard

attendee
#33

Can you provide any insight on timing of equity research?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#34

Yes. So we do know of one sell-side who is looking to initiate coverage soon. With today's press release, I got contacted by 2 others who are looking to initiate research. So that, as you know, is -- they have a compliance and a due diligence process that takes sometimes weeks, if feels like months, but we're working on that. So we hope to have some of that coverage out probably by Q4.

Grant Howard

attendee
#35

Who is your primary competition in the U.S. charter market? And how will you compete?

Edward Wegel

executive
#36

There are a couple of -- there's not really 1 primary competitor. We do compete with the 2 other primarily charter operators, that's World Atlantic and iAero Swift. We've just signed a marketing alliance with World Atlantic. So we will cross refer business to each other, cross-market our products. They fly smaller airplanes. They do fly Jet airplanes, but their MD-80s. And so we're seeking ways to work together with them. iAero Swift is a Boeing platform. They have a lot of airplanes. They've been in the market a long time. We've been able to compete effectively because the market has grown. And again, we're effectively sold out for our first 4 airplanes soon to be sold out for our first 6 airplanes. So the other competitors -- the big airlines do put some airplanes into charter for sport teams and other specialty events. We compete a little bit against that, but not much. Airlines like Sun Country and Allegiant also offer their airplanes for charter clients, Allegiant mostly out West, Sun Country out of the Midwest. And we do compete against them, but they are also primarily scheduled airlines. So they need to move their capacity back into scheduled service fairly quickly, while our aircraft are dedicated to charter. So we can more effectively compete against them because of our capacity, and our capacity is dedicated to charter. It doesn't have to be moved back into scheduled service. So we've been effectively competing against them for contracts over the last few months. And I think the results show that we can compete very effectively against them.

Grant Howard

attendee
#37

We have more questions, again, on the topic of the commons and Jet B and a lot of this has been answered. The only new twist on this is, if a non-American buys Jet common, will it again automatically convert to Jet B?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#38

No.

Edward Wegel

executive
#39

No, it won't.

Grant Howard

attendee
#40

Well, I have to interpret this one a bit because the question was about expanding the fleet, the aircraft fleet and would that affect current shareholders in terms of share dilution. I mean this really gets back to whether or not you do a future financing?

Edward Wegel

executive
#41

Well, we would do a future financing to add more aircraft to the fleet, more aircraft to the fleet means more revenue, should mean more EBITDA and a higher multiple. So Yes, there'll be more shares, but there will be more EBITDA per share. So the math is fairly simple. And we certainly can't grow to 50 airplanes with what we have now.

Grant Howard

attendee
#42

No, I understand. You need the capital. Are we experiencing any attrition with employees? Are we losing them back to previous employers? And are you remaining competitive?

Edward Wegel

executive
#43

We have not lost anyone going back to any of the major airlines. The primary reason is we did not hire anyone who came from or was furloughed by a major airline. So we thought through that process fairly rigidly to ensure that we did not put ourselves in a position of training someone knowing that they go back once the furlough period ended.

Grant Howard

attendee
#44

And there's more questions here about NASDAQ. Would our Canadian shares become one? I think all of that has been addressed. This is to you, Ed. How is the progress on A321 being added to the AOC?

Edward Wegel

executive
#45

That's going fine. The local FAA office has started to look at the paperwork. We will have to conduct an evacuation drill just as we did on the A320. Reason being that the exits -- the overwing exits on the A321 create an additional complexity in the airplane, so we have to show that our flight attendants are able to assess the situation in the event of an emergency and we'll pop the slides properly. We don't see -- we don't anticipate any issues or problems with that. We've scheduled the hanger so that we can do this at desk again. And that will be done within the next 1 week to 10 days. So we had almost record setting time for deployment of the slides on the A320, we expect the same result when we do the A321. It's been conformed. The airplane is great, great condition, ready to fly. The FAA is very happy with the way we prepared that aircraft for in service with us.

Grant Howard

attendee
#46

From an individual mentioned that Air Transat, in Canada, is for sale and that Canada Jetlines should buy it.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#47

Yes. It's $700 million. Let me know, I'll make it happen.

Edward Wegel

executive
#48

We would rather build from scratch. We want to interview and recruit and train our own employees, our own team members that we bring into the airline. We want to select the airplanes that we take and then we want to select our own roots, our own real estate assets and other assets. So we're quite happy building it from scratch. We think that that's the best way to go.

Grant Howard

attendee
#49

In regards to the contracts for August that were discussed, can we come back to that topic? And do we have an estimated date for the first flight?

Edward Wegel

executive
#50

Yes. We have an estimated date that keeps getting closer to today. So if everyone would just take a deep breath and relax, we will actually put an airplane into the air and get revenue from it. Now whether it's by Friday or over the weekend, it will happen very, very soon.

Grant Howard

attendee
#51

Just a couple more. Somebody asking about the difference between Jet common and Jet B. Ryan, if you don't mind, I'll answer this. The only difference there, all rights and privileges are the same. The common are voting shares. The Jet B are not voting shares. Is that okay?

Ryan Goepel

executive
#52

Yes.

Grant Howard

attendee
#53

Is there an opportunity to fly cargo for Amazon?

Edward Wegel

executive
#54

Yes.

Grant Howard

attendee
#55

And the last one, do you currently own the building you're in? And if so, would it be sold to offset any cost of the new hanger?

Edward Wegel

executive
#56

We do not own the building. It's owned by the airport authority here at Miami International, and it will be demolished in about 2 years. So whether we like it or not, we have to move. But it's great space for us to start up in. It's dirt cheap. It overlooks the runway. Our crews can get from the building out to the airport terminal very, very quickly. We could park our airplanes right outside, and we can see them. And we were able to turn the camera around, I could show you our 2 airplanes sitting there ready to fly. So this is a great space for us to start. And hopefully, in 2 years, we'll be in a brand-new beautiful building with our maintenance facility right next door, our simulators for training and our administrative offices all in 1 location.

Grant Howard

attendee
#57

And with that, we've covered all the questions. Again, gentlemen, congratulations, great job. We've never worked with anybody in our almost 33 years that has had as much positive news flow as Global Crossing Airlines. So well done. With that, to our attendees, thank you. A recording of this will be distributed very, very shortly, and you can pass it on to your friends and associates. So thank you again, and we will be talking soon.

Edward Wegel

executive
#58

Thanks, Grant.

Ryan Goepel

executive
#59

Thanks, Grant.

Edward Wegel

executive
#60

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you.

Read the full transcript via the API

You're viewing the first half of this call. Get the complete Global Crossing Airlines Group Inc. transcript — plus 252,000+ transcripts from 12,000+ companies, speaker segments, AI summaries and full-text search — through the EarningsCalls.dev API.

Get the API View API docs →

For developers and AI pipelines

Programmatic access to Global Crossing Airlines Group Inc. earnings transcripts and 252,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.