United Airlines Holdings, Inc. (UAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

So good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming to our investor event today. We're really excited to have you here in person. We're the first company here at the NASDAQ to hold an external event. How this came about is largely just because we can do an in-person event, and we're in the business of uniting people, connecting the world. So what better way to do that than to kick off the first event here at the NASDAQ. So with that, we're going to start with a quick video and give you guys a recap of all the wonderful things we've done at United in the last year. Please roll the clip. [Presentation]

Okay. This is an exciting video. I watched it on the airplane yesterday. It's awesome. Well, look, thank you all for joining us this morning for our first in-person event. It's great to be back in person and seeing people, and that's obviously key to our business and the future, but it is nice. Well, we're going to talk about United Next today. I want to take a minute for a little retrospective, I think, on how we got here before we get to the slides and the deck. And first, I would say that I am incredibly proud and grateful to the whole United team for everything they've done to get us through the worst crisis in the history of aviation. And I may be biased, but I think it's actually pretty objective to say United managed through the crisis better than anyone -- any other airline in the entire world. And this crisis impacted us, should have impacted us more than any other airline because we are the largest international carrier by -- long-haul international carrier by far out of the United States. We're the largest business carrier. And those are the 2 areas that got impacted the most. And as we went through the crisis, we had a realistic approach to the crisis. We really started in that last weekend of February, where I was calling Gerry and the rest of the executive team on Sunday when the buyer showed up in Italy, and we were telling each other, this is a global pandemic, even if no one else knows it, we didn't know why no one else knew it yet, but it seems like a global pandemic. We quickly reached our at least baseline assumption that this was going to take until the second half of 2021 before we got to a recovery, and it was going to be deep and that the crisis was going to last a long time. Because we did that, it allowed us to prepare adequately, including all the financing stuff that Gerry and Pam and team did to lead on financing initiatives, safety and health being the first airline in a number -- first airline to partner -- the CleanPlus partnership, the first airline to require masks. But because we were doing that, we not only had a number of firsts as we went through the crisis, we actually had a number of onlys as we went through the crisis. We were the only airline, for example, that did a deal with our pilots to keep our pilots all in their same seats. And that's why today, we are the only large carrier that has not had big pilot staffing issues or crew staffing issues where we've canceled 100 of flights. We're literally the only one. But that's because we thought last April, May that this was going to last a long time. And so we needed to put a process -- a deal in place. And our pilots worked with us on that. I think today's order is important to be able to say, no, this is a -- how often do you see the pilots union quoted in the same press release as management. That tells you something about the bond we have. We don't always agree on everything. There are things we do disagree on and we always disagree on, but we agree on making United the biggest and the best airline in the world, and we find ways to come together to make that a reality. We were the only airline at the beginning of the crisis to -- back in April, like not just the only airline, I think the only people that thought that business travel would ultimately recover, business and long-haul international. I will say today that I believed that in April or May last year. That belief got stronger every month as we went through the crisis, every anecdote that I saw, every person that I talked to, who started to migrate from it's never coming back to well, it's going to come back some, it's not going to be quite all the way. That migration changed. Today, we're down about 60% in business travel. We were down just a few months ago, 90%, so a huge acceleration. I'm pretty confident from all the anecdotes and talking to everyone that we talk to, I talk to and that our sales team talks to that in September after Labor Day, business travel is going to start coming back in earnest. I don't think it comes back fully until 2023. But I'm beyond saying I'm confident it's going to come back. Business travel is going to come back. It's probably coming back in full by 2023. But because we took that view early in the crisis, we were unique in what we did. We were the only airline that didn't go out and retire huge portions -- or only global airline in the Western Hemisphere that didn't go out and retire huge portions of our fleet. And that positions United uniquely for today. And this plan is about capitalizing on the unique advantages that we have at United Airlines. This United Next is much more than an aircraft purchase. That may be the headlines, but this is much more than an aircraft purchase. This is about changing the customer experience. And anyone that's listened to me in the last year can probably -- has probably heard me say the word customer a lot. We are deadly serious at United Airlines about getting customers to choose to fly United, about creating an airline that people don't dread that portion of their travel, that people actually want to fly and look forward to the experience. And this aircraft order is a key part of that, getting rid of 200 small regional jets, which our customers dislike, and replacing them with what are going to be the best airplanes, the signature interior aircraft with seatback entertainment at every seat, WiFi, power ports, the whole works that you'll hear more about today. But these are going to be the best airplanes flying. And you combine that with the customer service culture that's changing at United, I mean, I really -- we are -- the bet we're making today -- I've got asked a couple of times, are you making a bet on business travel? The bet we're making today is not about business travel returning, business travel is going to return. The bet we're making today is that customers care about the product and that we can decommoditize this industry and get customers to choose to fly United Airlines because they like the product. We are unique in the ability to really make that bet, partly because -- mostly because our hubs are in the 7 best markets of anywhere in the country. We're in the largest cities in the country. Everyone that's followed the aviation industry for my entire career has consistently had a refrain of United has this huge potential, why haven't they realized it? United hasn't realized it because we didn't take advantage of it. We're trying to fly 50-seat regional jets between Chicago and Dallas or between Newark and Atlanta. And we're trying to compete with people that have a much better product. We had no chance to compete effectively. And this order is about remedying that and creating a domestic network that has a product that our customers like and that customers will choose to fly us and really realizing the demographic advantage that we have with our 7 hubs. While today is mostly about the North American network, because this is a narrow-body order, it is important to point out that we're the only airline that didn't retire wide-body fleets. We actually today have about the same number of wide-bodies as all the other U.S. airlines combined. We are uniquely positioned for the rebound and the acceleration in international demand. And I think that's going to be incredibly strong because that's the area where there's the most structural change as we went through the pandemic. From a financial perspective, what all of that leads to is because we're going to have a 30% increase in gauge, not only is that a much better product for our customers. And we've actually given you all the math today on how we get to a CASM ex down 8% 7 years from 2019. So by 2026, we're down 8%. And that leads to the financial results that you see in the deck. A really amazing financial results even if it takes until 2026 or later for RASM to get back to where it was in 2019. So this is not a pie in the sky plan built on aggressive revenue assumptions or winning a lot of market share. I think that there's a lot of upside for us to those 2 things. And if I had to take a bet, I would certainly bet the over on what RASM will be by the time we get to 2026. But this plan is not dependent on, and we are in control of the 8% and making sure we get there. And so this is not just a plan about United and our competitive advantages. This is something that I think is happening more broadly across the industry. And a lot of you have used rails as the analogy for airlines. I think a better analogy actually is the hotel industry. And lot of similarities, easier to compete, assets are more portable. But the hotel industry has done a great job of segmenting their brands. And the JW Marriott lives within the same company as the Courtyard Marriott, but they appeal to different customers, they appeal to different types of trips and they are decommoditized. For far too long in the aviation industry, we've thought of price as the only reason that customers choose to fly airlines, too many of us. I don't think that's right. I'm actually quite certain it's not right. And that's what this plan is about. It's about decommoditizing. And you see this happening, by the way, across the industry, I think. This is not unique to United. Others are moving into kind of their competitive advantages and focusing in hubs or in type of markets or type of product even that appeals to their competitive advantage. And I think that's going to be a better tailwind for the industry. It's going to be better for all of our customers and certainly a unique opportunity and advantage for United. So before I turn it over to Gerry, I'll just say one last thing -- or Andrew. Gerry is going to go through the financials with you, but -- later. But the reason we've given you a detailed financials that go all the way out to 2026, which I suspect is pretty unusual to see is because we want to be -- we want everyone to know that we are absolutely committed to hitting those numbers. We're going to all hold each other accountable to hitting them, and you can hold me accountable and you can hold all of us accountable to hitting those numbers. And so we put them out there, not because they're aspirational in any sense, but because that's the minimum targets that we are going to hit. So thank you all for being here. It's great to be back in person. And I'll now turn it over to Andrew, who will give you a lot more detail on the network and the product.

Thanks, Scott. Well, it's great to be here today. Maybe I'll start off with kind of the evolution in thinking here, and I'm going to give you all of the commercial details in just a few seconds. But what we're announcing today is really -- we've been putting the building blocks in place for this over a number of years. So we're unveiling a lot of the details today. But really, this is in very much respect to continuation of a lot of the things we had talked about over the last few years and building up and starting to differentiate our product, taking advantage of our global network and so on and so forth. We were here a few years ago where we focused on one particular thing because it was a gigantic gap in our network. And we had incredible success pre-pandemic starting to close that gap, and that was in our mid-continent hubs. So these are 2 slides from, I think, very early 2018 when we were here in New York City, where we talked about our mid-continent hub gap where our mid-con hubs were dramatically different than our competitors' mid-con hubs with different types of airplanes, a lack of scale, a lack of connectivity. And at that meeting, I think there was a bit of skepticism on our ability to execute on that plan, which I think we proved very, very wrong very, very quickly. And that the capacity we were adding, particularly from our high ground, from our hubs, did incredibly well. So we're really proud of that. And part of our plan today is a continuation of that. We haven't gotten the mid-con hubs to where others we'd like them to be. So you'll see more of that in a few seconds. Next slide, please. I have no clicker today. So United Next, which is -- this is our kind of plan for the future. It's really about our global network. I joked to a lot of people. If you looked at the definition of United -- or sorry, global in a dictionary, you'd find a United jet next to it. We're going to talk about a lot of the details that are related to that. But we have premium hubs in the best and largest U.S. cities. And United Next is about a commercial plan that wraps around the demographics of those hubs to differentiate our products. So we're going to optimize our fleet, in particular, as Scott hinted, the 50-seat regional jets, the single-class ones, we're going to retire at a pretty rapid pace and get the gauge way up. Many of our competitors have already pushed the gauge button, and we are ready to push it today, a leading product where we're going to decommoditize our product and take advantage of the premium revenue potential of our hubs and really the best service. You've already seen incredible changes in our NPS. In the middle of a pandemic, our NPS scores are up through the roof. Our J.D. Power scores improved the most. And we've just really started. So we are really excited about bringing this all together. So it's more than a fleet plan. It's more than a network plan. It's a customer plan as well. So next slide. So as we start off, I want you to think about our network in 2 different ways. One are coastal gateways, which are, of course, here in New York/Newark, Washington, Dallas on the East Coast and then San Francisco and LA on the West. And then our mid-continent hubs; Denver, Houston and Chicago. They do 2 different very things, but they both have a common problem, and that is gauge. We fly these tiny little aircraft in these often big markets up against aircraft that are bigger that have much better unit economics. And United Next is about making a big transition out of that, particularly from the coastal gateways in New York and San Francisco, there is limited runway capacity to expand. So larger aircraft is really the only way we can expand, particularly out of New York. And so these larger aircraft are really, really key to doing that. The gauge is a common problem across the entire United Airlines network that's really going to be improved dramatically by this plan. Next slide. So here's, I think, 3 -- a lot of numbers on the slide, but 3 things to take away. Our hubs are the blue bars. So our hubs are in the biggest markets, but in particular, the middle chart is really, really important. Our hubs have more long-haul demand than our competitors' hubs. And that makes us a very different airline. And then the last slide on the right, our hubs have more premium demand. In fact, New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, Houston, all line up there. So particularly when you combine that premium demand and long-haul demand together, it really puts United in a really unique, totally different space than many of our competitors. And given this gauge problem resolved, not only in our mid-con hubs but in our coastal gateways, actually unlocks a lot of connectivity and feed to the long-haul network to fly places like New York to Johannesburg, which we started just a few weeks ago. So our hubs are really unique. And United for all of history, I think, has failed to get the right set of commercial and customer strategies around the unique characteristics and demographics of our hubs. We started moving in that way 3 or 4 years ago and made some progress, but there's a lot more we can do, and the United Next plan is about fully executing around this entire spectrum to make sure we achieve the full potential of these hubs and get our margins where we'd like them to be. So next slide. So I talk about our international entity all the time, and I say how great it is. This is the first time I think we've ever released data like this is where we constantly compare our P&L versus that of our competitors. And obviously, this is 2019, the last year before the pandemic. And this gives you an idea about our relative performance, flying our global long-haul network. So first of all, on the far right, we think in round numbers, our network, our long-haul network generates an 8-point margin advantage relative to our competitors. We do really well flying around the globe. And it's because of that previous slide, that premium capacity, premium yield, gigantic demand this is a magic formula for long-haul flying that makes us distinctly different. A few years ago, when I came to New York, we really didn't talk about this very much. We really focused on the mid-con hubs, but this was always there. And in fact, we have been taking advantage of this during the pandemic, particularly when -- or pre-pandemic when we couldn't get as many narrow-body aircraft as we needed because of all the issues everybody knows about. We did have the opportunity to get some wide-bodies, and we really did start pushing on this button. So moving over to the left, the Pacific, I think maybe that United is the only airline that makes money across the Pacific possibly. But you can see this margin gap is just gigantic. We are really advantaged in part because of San Francisco, but also in part because of New York. There's tremendous Asian demand out of these cities, and we do it better than anybody else. Across the Atlantic, a 9-point advantage. The amazing thing about the United Airlines network flying across the Atlantic is we can do well, flying, of course, to our partner hubs, which we do all day long, a really common theme in the airline business, but we do just as well, flying to spokes. We can make as much money flying to Milan that we can to Frankfurt, that we can to London Heathrow, or Madrid or anywhere else in Europe. And again, that is a unique characteristic of United, and it's due to these gateways that we fly from. For South America, we're pretty much on par with our long-haul competitors with a similar margin in those entities. So really proud of this, and this is something we're going to feature more and more often in our plans going forward because it's one of our unique things. It's our high ground, and we will focus on it quite a bit in the future. Next slide. So as we talked, this is a gauge, gauge, gauge story. So in 2019, United's gauge was the lowest of all of our competitors. In fact, I think the lowest of any airline in the country at 104 seats per departure. It was that -- because we were flying about 325 single-class 50-seat RJs. In fact, single-class RJ is made up about 33% of all of our North American departures, often flying against a larger jet, whether it be a legacy competitor or a low-cost competitor. Our legacy peers were at 114 a few years ago. They're a bit higher than this today and obviously going higher. And of course, the ULCCs get their cost advantages in a big way through just packing the number of seats on board the aircraft. So our RJs, they have poor unit economics overall. They're high cost, high unit cost aircraft to fly. They often spill demand. And by the way, with fewer seats in this product, we often close our inventories really early. So our prices are actually higher than our competitors that offer a mainline jet. It's a really -- you have a product which would otherwise be less to standard and you have a situation where you have to charge more for that product to get the appropriate financial returns. And you never can get the right financial returns. And so it's a subpar product, it spills demand and its poor unit economics. And we are going to finally really address this, and we're going to address it really quickly. And this -- while our competitors do have gauge increases coming, nobody has a gauge increase coming to the likes of United, which is going to create a tremendous CASM ex benefit that Gerry is going to talk about in quite a bit of detail in a little bit. So next slide. Here is a good example. Our hub in O'Hare, ORD, on this slide, 42% of our departures are single class RJs. Our biggest competitor in O'Hare is only 28% and that number is going down. And then in Minneapolis and Detroit, close by, the number is 18% and 19% and likely headed close to 0 over the next year or 2. So we're going to take 42%, and we're going to reduce it down to 4%. It's going to be a marked change about who United is in Chicago. We're already the leading carrier. We're already the leading carrier globally out of Chicago. But to these small communities, this is going to be a marked change and a really important change. We're going to be more profitable. Again, we're going to avoid spill in demand. It's going to be a much better product. We're going to have great connectivity. Our unit costs are going to go down. We're going to differentiate. We're going to segment our revenue a lot better than we have in the past. We're going to have much higher NPS score. And that's going to affect not only those short-haul flights, but the entire airline. And again, we're going to take 33% of our North American departures and cut them back to 10% for 50-seat single-class RJs. So 10% is still quite a few departures on these type of aircraft. And well, given that some of our competitors are actually limiting the type completely, we see it as an opportunity, particularly for example, from Denver. If you're trying to fly from Denver to these very, very small mountain cities within an hour or 2 of Denver, a single-class RJ providing high frequency service is a competitive advantage, not a disadvantage. So we'll use the aircraft to fly to small cities where it's an advantage instead of a disadvantage as we have it today. So we really think that's part of our plans. Again, when we see others getting rid of them entirely, we see it as an opportunity to take advantage of where the aircraft should properly be flown. Next slide. I think this is probably one of the most important slides. And it goes without saying that from a mainline narrow-body point of view, in terms of our financial performance, if you rank them from 130 seaters up to 190 seaters, our margin goes up, not only at United Airlines. So we make more money flying a 737-900 than we do flying a 737-700. I think that is a common thread throughout our business, and our competitors have been rapidly adding aircraft that's top of the range being the MAX -- well, the MAX10 is not flying yet, the MAX10 and the A321. And this small number of seats difference has a high impact on our profitability. And so today, only 4% of United's mainline narrowbody jets are in the large narrow-body group. That's 27% at our legacy peers and actually increasing. Most aircraft being delivered today tend to be in this larger category. So we're going to take United from 4% to 33%. This is really, really important. These aircraft, again, have proven. These are the right machines to fly within the domestic system. They're the right size and they generate outsized profit margins versus the smaller mainline jets that United and, in fact, the industry has traditionally flown. This is a significant structural gap, the lack of these type of aircraft in our system today, and it is dramatic where literally we have almost none. And when we end United Next, we'll be at 33%. I don't know where our competitors will be then, probably higher than they show in this chart. But the tailwind, the profitability and margin tailwind from this decision is just really, really key. These are machines that have been proven time and time again to produce higher margins in the industry. And these are the machines that are selling the best if you clearly look at the order books. And this is a machine that we do not have in the United Airlines network today. So very, very important. Next slide. So we're going to improve connectivity. And this is a slide about our long-haul fleet. We are the biggest global airline in the U.S. industry today. And we do incredibly well from our gateways in many big cities across the country. But we don't do nearly as well in smaller communities across the country, connect into our global long-haul flight. And again, it's because of these small aircraft not providing the adequate feed or adequate product. So our share, for example, in small communities to the world is 26%. Our legacy peers actually outperform us in this market, even though we're dramatically larger and taking people to the world. We're going to be able to erase this gap. Here in Newark, we still fly. And Newark is our largest gateway -- largest hub in the East Coast. We still fly a ton of single-class RJs, 27% of the operation. We're going to take that to 0. And we're actually going to take it to 0 by the end of this year. So we'll have all dual-class RJs and mainline jets because this is just really key to getting the connectivity and product quality across the entire passenger journey. Next slide. The mid-continent hubs, I think, they are really in -- we're in better shape than we were 3 years ago, but we have a long way to go. I often, when I talk to you guys, talk about getting a critical mass of connectivity in each of our departure banks. And I often say that's north of 70 flights per departure bank to build that incredible connectivity to make it work. So today, only 10% of our departure banks at United Airlines are actually at that critical mass. As much progress as we made over the last 3 years, and we made a lot in these hubs, we still have undersized banks which lead to undersized connectivity. And we're going to take the 10% critical mass banks, and they're going to become 65%. So really not very focused on building a lot more gates. There are some gates being built by our airports around the country because that's what airports do. But we want to make sure that we utilize all the gates we do have incredibly efficiently. So when you think about the CASM ex information that Gerry is going to give you, think about a hub in O'Hare where you have a peak bank of 80 departures and then the next bank is 25 departures, the next bank's 45 departures and then back up to 85. Just think about the productivity of the gate agents during that time period because they're working a full shift. So we're going to get all of these banks, not all of them, but a majority of those banks up to this critical mass. It's going to create all kinds of great CASM ex tailwind and we're going to get connectivity where we needed to be and connectivity that if our peers did not change, it's actually better than theirs. And this is something we've trailed in for years. So this is really, really important. So gate utilization, hub staffing, connectivity, low marginal cost. Overall, it's 15 extra flights per bank. And I'm going to talk about it at the end, but it's worth saying it here again. The majority of the growth that comes out of this plan is actually gauge. This is really not about opening a lot of new cities or even a lot of new routes in the domestic system. This is about getting the right aircraft on the right mission. And I'm going to talk about that even further, but it's really, really critical. This is not trying to just grow ASM for the sake of ASM. So next slide. So overall, this is 30 more seats or about 30%. We're going to take 104 up to 134 over this time period per departure. So this is our North American fleet. The wide-bodies are excluded from it. From 104 departure seats for departure today to 134. There's a lot of ways you can measure this number. And I'm sure the analysts in this room will try to dive -- go into deep and try to figure this all out. Sometimes, for example, we're choosing to keep 50 seaters, a small number of 50 seaters in our fleet because we think that's the right margin and P&L decision. One of our competitors is not going to do that. So if you were to take the 50 seaters out of this number, our 134 would actually be dramatically higher. So when you think about these numbers, think about it within the context of the decisions we're making. But even with the 50 seaters, we'll be keeping in our fleet, this number moves dramatically. If you were to remove the remaining single-class 50 seaters to try and get a more apples-to-apples comparison, you'd find this number to be dramatically higher than even this. Next slide. So I talked about wrapping our hubs with the right products. And then I showed you a slide that showed the premium opportunities out of our hubs. And the 50-seat RJ single-class ones in particular, really never fully got everything optimized. And so today, as we drop all these 50 seaters that are single class and add these mainline jets, what you see on this slide is there are a number of seats that we have in United First and premium economy are growing from 31 per departure to 53 per departure. And it's simple math, it's because the 50-seat single jets that we retire have none of those seats. And so this will put us in a really, I think, very strong position to attract the premium revenues in our hub cities that we don't today and easily enough. The number of premium seats we'll have onboard our aircraft is actually going to be significantly higher, I think, in total because we will continue to have about 35 or -- sorry, 50 or so Economy Plus seats, for example, on our MAX8 aircraft that delivered yesterday. And our primary competitors offer about half that number. So it is a great opportunity with this larger fuselage to make sure we have the right seats in each cabin. I will say, because often, airlines, when they order a brand-new fleet of this magnitude, use it as an opportunity to densify their aircraft. And we thought about that really carefully. And clearly, if we put more seats on aircraft, our CASM ex benefit goes even higher. But we are trying to wrap all those benefits together with a customer experience and so we've chosen not to densify the aircraft. We're using the same comfort standards we always have. And as a result, the number of seats that we're able to offer in Economy Plus is going to be, I think, dramatically higher than some of our competitors, and we're really excited about that, and it's going to be unique to United and part of differentiating our product strategy going forward. Next slide. The CRJ-550 is something we talked about 2 years ago. We continue to roll that out. We plan to have about 75. They're focused here in Newark and in Chicago. There are a 50-seat RJ within our scope limitations that has a 1:1 baggage ratio, has United First, has Economy Plus. It's done incredibly well. Obviously, we're in the middle of a pandemic, still hard to measure now. But pre-pandemic, we were getting the appropriate results. We were getting higher margins off this 50-seater than we were off the single jet 50-seater. So we think it's actually working, and we're really, really happy with that performance. So we will continue to fly in the neighborhood of 74 of these jets for the run rate as part of our network and fleet strategy. Next slide. So we're going to -- I talked about our premium capacity. And I really talked about it from a domestic point of view. This slide is going to focus a little bit more on international long-haul. We just have incredible demand from New York or San Fran or Washington, you name it. Our gateways for our long-haul product for premium, it's really different for us than I think some of our competitors. So today, United has 44 flatbed seats on average onboard our wide-body jets flying globally. 40% more than our legacy peers are about 32. That 40% is really important and really different. I'm not sure everybody realizes what's the massive gap that we had to our competitors on that front. And it's because our gateways just produce this level of premium business that our competitors gateways I don't believe produce. That being said, it's a question, well, is 44 too many? Could we optimize the P&L more or less? I can tell you, pre-pandemic, we're actually thinking that 44 was insufficient for United Airlines. We were developing plans to have higher business class aircraft than even this. We obviously have put that on hold. We believe business traffic is coming back, but we're not ready to increase the 44. By the way, our competitors and our foreign flag partners that are flying into our hubs and overlap, they fly an average of 63. So this is really a critical way that we differentiate ourselves and we generate that profit margin you saw very early in the presentation because we just have -- like we're born on third base when it comes to international premium and long-haul demand. It's different. It's different for us. And we really -- as our competitors restructure, as our competitors say they're no longer interested in strategic flying, well, none of that flying was ever strategic for United, it was just profitable. And as things rationalized and strategic flying by others go away, we think this gets even better. So we're more bullish on the international long-haul sector than we have been in a long time. We need the borders to come down. They're going to come down. It may take a while, particularly in Asia, but it's going to happen. And as Scott said earlier, we didn't retire any of our wide-body jets. And in fact, just right before the pandemic, we ordered a bunch of new ones that are being delivered over the next few months. So as we go into the summer of 2022, we actually have 30 more wide-body jets available to fly than we had in the summer of 2019, a really unique formula for United. And as I said earlier, we believe the Atlantic is going to be gangbusters next summer. And we're prepared to do it. We have the aircraft. We have the product, they have the people. And it's because we were very careful in selecting what we would retire and not retire. And in particular, the question I've gotten from many of you is on the 767 fleet, which is a bit older in our network, obviously, today. We've run -- redo the interiors of all those aircraft, so the interiors are brand new. And at 167 seats, so about 200 seats and the trip cost that these aircraft have in their rank, this is a unique structural advantage for us. When the other airlines are retiring 767s, we think this is great. It provides us an opportunity to fly places. And I'll give you the example of flying to whether it's Naples or Prague. These are the right-sized aircraft to fly to these smaller European markets. And we think we're going to be in a really great situation where we have the right piece of metal, the right aircraft to fly into those type of places that our competitors gave up. On the right side, and I think this is, again, really a chart that I didn't even realize how different we were. The United Airlines literally has more flat-bed seats flying today than all of our competitors in the United States combined. Literally, that's how different we are. And I guarantee nobody in this room knew that, and the media didn't know that. We are completely different. And United Next is about recognizing those differences, recognizing those structural advantages and pushing them, something I think really is fascinating. Next slide. Interiors on the narrowbodies we ordered. So we ordered 270 aircraft. We are putting seatback entertainment on them, one-on-one overhead bins, of course, pretty lighting, the best WiFi that we can find. It's probably still not good enough for some of you, but that's the best WiFi we can find, all the brands and elements. And we're also going to take all of the remaining narrowbodies at United and convert them to the same interior by sometime in mid-2025. So when you get on a United Jet, it's going to be a great experience, but it's -- more importantly, it's going to be a consistent experience. For so many years, we've had a few nice new aircraft out there, but other aircraft had old laminates on them or whatever it may be. These aircraft are going to look great. In particular, the seatback IFE. We have a number of aircraft with this. We can tell our NPS scores are off the chart when we offer this type of product. Our customer satisfaction is off the chart. And everything about the experience of flying on an aircraft with seatback TV is better. The food is better on our aircraft with seatback TVs. Literally, the food is better. And it's a halo effect that comes from obviously occupying the time of our customers while they're flying a 3- to 5- or 6-hour journey, really important. There are some other airlines that do offer seatbacks, and there's many airlines that don't. But when you combine our network, particularly our global network, this product, these seatbacks, we really are in a process of differentiating our product. And it's not just for the people that sit upfront, by the way, there's a seatback monitor in every screen -- every seat. So when we are competing on the low end or the high end, we're often an elevated product, and it really -- our belief is this is going to allow us to differentiate better segment our revenue and make sure we generate the most revenue we can from this new aircraft. Next. As I said earlier, our -- in the middle of pandemic, our NPS scores are off the chart. The cultural change at United is unbelievable. Hopefully, many of you have seen that if you've been flying recently. Our employees are proud to come to work. They're engaged. We are reaching agreements with folks. The pilot example of -- the pre-pandemic or the pandemic agreement we reached to keep everybody in their seat really unprecedented. It has positioned us well going forward. So these type of things. And we just gotten started. Imagine when our entire fleet looks like the picture I just showed you, we think our NPS scores are going to be through the roof. But we also think that our employees are going to be incredibly proud to show up at United every day and fly with this product. And all that's a cycle that just builds on each other, creating just a winning atmosphere on a winning team. Our J.D. Power results this year, we're not where we want to be in total. I think that's -- we just -- we know that, and we're going to make it -- get there. But 50-point improvement this year, the most of any of the airlines. We're moving in the right direction, and again, we've just started. So a really, really exciting stuff on this front. Next slide. So United Next is about a lot of things, and it's more than a fleet plan, it's more than a network plan. Hopefully, I came across. But I will say, gauge, gauge, gauge. Gauge is an underlying problem throughout the United business plan that we will address and we will fix. We're going to grow by 30 seats or 30%, as I said earlier. It's going to create a really great product. And it's not about densifying our aircraft. A lot of the airlines have pulled that trigger. We're not densifying our aircraft to lower our cost. We're going to maintain those same product standards, but these are the right aircraft. The customer experience is going to be incredible. Connectivity, I've talked about ad nauseam with you guys for years. Scale and schedule depth. Schedule depth is going up by 10%. Our hub departures from our mid-con hubs will be up about 100 flights per day throughout the time horizon of this, which is about 2026. It's not really that much. We're not trying to create a 1,000 flight a day hub. We don't need that. It's not part of our network plan. We're focused on gauge, gauge, gauge. Next slide. Here's the ASM. ASM has kind of come out at the end on this based on the equation. But what you see on this page, most again, what we're doing is gauge. New routes, we have a few. Increased frequency a bit, but our focus here is [Technical Difficulty]. Next slide, we're almost near the end. Just a few more, maybe stuck, there we are. In terms of all the premium seats we offered, we've never, I think, revealed the number on the left-hand side of the page. So in 2019, 30% of our revenue came from the main section of the coach cabin onboard at United. This is something we never -- we've already, in many ways are a premium business airline. We carry a ton of cargo. We obviously have our co-brand business and our loyalty business. So about 30% of our revenue is coming from that coach section of the aircraft. That's going to go down, obviously, as we have more and more seats that are in the premium section of the aircraft to about 27% over this time period. And the other thing that's happening with this, and I think really impressive when Gerry gets up here, is that our stage length is going down. As we add more of these bigger aircraft, flying more domestic flights, the stage length of our airline, which has always been longer than our competitors because of the way we've built airline is coming down. As many of you know, when the stage comes down, that creates a lot of cost pressure up. And obviously, that's all accounted for in this document. And so Gerry will talk about the CASM ex part of this. But as stage comes down, something happened to good on the revenue front, generally, revenues go up. And as Scott said, our expectations are this is a really competitive marketplace domestically for a really long period of time. And he already told you that we're not really anticipating higher RASMs and TRASMs in 2026. I think we're going to get there. But when you think about our investment in product, when you think about the fact that our stage is coming down and where we have the RASM, TRASM numbers in the long run, as you can see from here, down 1% in 2026, that's where we'd like to leave you with, we actually think we have quite a bit of upside to beat this plan. And as Scott said earlier, we do have that no excuse philosophy at United, and we will do what it takes to deliver on these results. But stage is coming down, our product quality is increasing. This is long time. We're going to have more premium seats. We'd like to see RASM a lot better than down 1% by 2026. Next slide. So these are our opportunities. It's a comprehensive plan. It's a lot more than just a network plan or a fleet plan, but I'll leave you with, again, gauge, gauge, gauge, and it's going to build our connectivity. We have an international network that is proven. And I've given you some facts that I don't think I've ever released before on that. And we think we can do a lot more with that. Our gateways are unique. There's a lot of changes going on in the international environment that make it even more exciting. There's more first-class seats. We're going to finish the rollout of premium plus, the new mid-cabin section in our wide-bodies, which we had not done in 2019. We're going to have a really, I think, a very consistent and leading product across the board. We're going to be really hub focused. I didn't talk about that today, but we are going to be very hub focused. It's our high ground, and we know it. And it's where our best margin opportunities are, and we're really, really focused on delivering those RASM and profit opportunities. And we're going to be customer service focused. And then we have these United -- I would say these uniquely United configurations, which are just amazing and generate more margin and more profitability for us. So in our gauge, we're retiring these single class 50 seaters, and we're going to really better utilize our infrastructure so we drive our CASM down. It's really, really important. So that is the commercial and customer strategy that wraps around the United Next plan. And with that, I will hand it off to my colleague, Gerry, and he will talk about some more of the financial details. Thank you. Gerry?

Thanks, Andrew. Good morning, everyone. It is so nice to be in a room full of people again. For those of you listening on the webcast, I have to tell you, you all should be here. It's just great. A lot of smiling faces. Anyway, let's go to the next slide. Look, my job this morning is really pretty easy. As Scott said, it's just math. Why we're so comfortable that by 2026, we will have our CASM ex down 8% versus 2019? I got to tell you, my career has not been a short career. I have never seen a plan vetted as much as this plan. Between Andrew's commercial team, the finance organization, our operations groups, we've taken, I think, advantage of some of this sort of time we've had during the crisis to really think long and hard about the future, and the plan we've come up with I think is the absolute right plan. And really, the way to think about it is this is so much better than not doing anything. And for a while, United really did nothing and this is solving a lot of problems. But my focus is really on the cost side. And I'm going to touch on each of these 3 key points that are going to drive our CASM ex numbers; our structural cost savings; the impact of gauge, Andrew talked a lot about that; and then the ability to grow incredibly cost efficiently. Putting that aside, it is worth pointing out that these new aircraft, as you know, are the most fuel-efficient aircraft you can get. And when you look, this is actually on a consolidated basis, we are going to reduce our fuel burn by 11%. So tremendous fuel efficiency, great for the environment and terrific for the bottom line. So let's go on to the next slide. So like I say, the first draft of this slide said that we identified over $2 billion of structural cost savings. That's wrong. These have not been identified. These are actually being implemented. These are real cost savings that we've been able to start really doing. And really, it's one silver lining, I think, from COVID. We had no choice last year. We had to cut costs. We had to reduce management headcount. We had to stop doing the things that we just didn't need to do. And so it's much easier in that context then to not bring those costs back. So these cost savings have already started. Now the $2 billion -- actually over $2 billion, that's the run rate. When we get back to pre-COVID capacity, that's where we're going to see those $2 billion. So today, since we're not quite there yet, we're not at $2 billion. But for those of you that are doing your modeling, you can model that back at pre-COVID capacity, we will have over $2 billion of cost savings. And these are permanent cost savings. These will be with us. And in fact, some of them which are volume-driven, will just continue to improve as we continue to grow past the pre-COVID levels. Split into 2 components. What I would describe as the workforce efficiency. Again, management reductions, roughly $300 million out of our cost structure and those are not coming back. Not only are we not doing things we shouldn't, we don't need to do any more. With the help of technology, we're able to do more with less people. And that's true throughout the system as we've been able to work on our processes throughout the operation that we will continue to be able to do more with less. And that's going to be something that will continue. On the nonlabor side, we've already started the process of taking advantage of this time to renegotiate some contracts to consolidate vendors. We've reduced our regional partners by 2, reduced the real estate footprint. We've given back 3 floors in the Willis Tower in Chicago. We've also throughout the system consolidated space. Our San Francisco maintenance base, we're able to reduce the footprint there, just everywhere we've been able to. And then just on the asset side, we've been able to take things like our ground service equipment and better optimize the use of them. So we don't need to have more equipment than necessary. On the parts side, being able to implement all sorts of efficiencies in the supply chain, all of that going into this $2 billion. So we're very, very comfortable that we've achieved this. This is not something that we are thinking about. It's already baked into the system. And that's actually when you think about the cost savings and the down 8% CASM, this is the one that was difficult, but it's done. The rest is just math. So let's go to the next slide. So this is the simple math for as you replace smaller, less efficient aircraft with newer, larger aircraft, you get a significant increase in seats per departure but really not very much additional cost. You think about crew costs are the same. It's still a 2-man cockpit, 2-person cockpit. You're spreading your fixed costs over more seats. All that drives a very significant CASM ex reduction. Let's go to the next slide. And then to the extent these aircraft are actually used for growth. Again, when you look at our average domestic CASM ex and you take a new MAX10 or 321neo, you're able to put that into the system at a much lower CASM. In fact, when we look at our ability, again, to spread fixed costs over more seats, we can actually grow in our hubs at a marginal CASM ex below $0.06. So when you think about that, you think about some of our competitors, not only are we producing the lowest incremental ASM costs in our hubs, it's incredibly competitive against even the most -- the lowest cost ULCCs in our hub. So a very strong ability to compete where we fly. Let's go to the next slide. Then on the fuel side, the amazing thing about the new generation aircraft, take a MAX9, which we currently operate. So we know the fuel burn on a MAX9. The MAX9 with 50 more seats than in A319 actually burns less fuel on a trip than a 319. So significant fuel savings. And separate from the CASM ex improvement, which is ex fuel, tremendous savings and tremendous boost to the P&L. Let's turn to the next slide. So I'll spend a little bit of time here. This is the waterfall that gets us to our CASM ex target in 2026. So the way we kind of look at it, so these -- the $2 billion of cost savings already baked in, that's going to cover the inflationary pressure we'll see over the next few years. The rest of this then is the gauge and the growth. And really, when you look at sort of between now and 2023, which we picked because we've given targets for 2023, so it's important for your models to know how we're going to get there, only about 1/3 of the gauge and growth efficiency is going to be achieved by 2023. This order is largely 2023 and beyond. So past 2023, while we don't have anything in here for additional cost savings, I guarantee you with the focus that Scott and the rest of the team has on hitting the numbers, we will continue those initiatives. We're just not assuming anything right now for that. We don't need to hit the down 8%, but about 2/3 of the gauge efficiency comes in post 2023. And then as Andrew mentioned, with stage length shrinking a little bit, there's a little bit of cost pressure there. But again, everything baked in to get us to the down 8% by 2026. Let's go to the next slide. So we did, by the way, order some aircraft. I thought it was kind of worth talking about a little bit. 150 MAX10s, 50 MAX8s and 70 321neos, a nice mix of aircraft, the right mix of aircraft for us. You can see that in 2023, we expect about 138 aircraft. And the reason we call out 2023 is that's only 1.5 years from now, that's pretty much baked in. With respect to the fleet beyond -- the deliveries beyond 2023, there's a little bit of a flexibility there. So we're looking at that in the aggregate of the order book for 2024 and beyond. Let's go to the next slide. So this is important. We are retaining significant flexibility with the fleet. And something that we've sort of baked into everything we're doing right now. I describe it as offramps. Whenever anybody wants to spend some money on some capital projects, one thing we've learned over the last year, it's important to understand what we can stop. And so for an aircraft order book, it's important to understand where is your flexibility? What can you do? So it really comes in 2 areas. One is just the ability to manage retirements. And we have as much flexibility on retirement as we do really the aircraft coming in. So if we want to just replace aircraft, we can do that; if we want to grow, as Andrew said, it's going to be a mix of both. But we have the ability to adjust the total size of the fleet based on the ability to retire some of those older aircraft. And if all we did was use these aircraft as replacements, it's still incredibly CASM ex positive. It's incredibly P&L positive. We also -- and the manufacturers don't like me talking too much about this. We do have some flexibility with the timing of deliveries. I've always said in the past, in a crisis, manufacturers are always willing to work with airlines, particularly big airlines, on the ability to reschedule deliveries. As long as they haven't started to cut the metal, they will work with customer. In this case, I've gone a step beyond. We have a little bit of that's written into the contract, our ability to shift things around a little bit. Very comfortable that we have enough flexibility to manage whatever comes at us from a macro level. Let's go on to the next slide. So CapEx, aircraft do cost a lot of money. Of course, for some people, cost less than others, but we won't talk about that. But 2023 will be a peak or the peak year for CapEx. Those 138 aircraft are in the plan. If you look at it over a several year period, it looks a little bit better, but 2023 should be peak. I would say that 2024, assuming everything goes according to our plan, 2024 would be similar, down a little bit, and then it will taper down after that. But 2023 will be the peak year. There are a number of bankers in the audience here who are smiling. I'm sure our phone will be ringing off the hook. Anyway, let's go on to the next slide. So here are our targets. So 2023, we've already said that by 2023, at the latest, our EBITDA margin will be back to where it was pre-COVID and still very comfortable that we are going to achieve that. Pretax in 2023 won't be. That's really just the added interest expense, which will start coming down over time. But there will be more interest expense versus 2019. And then more importantly, in 2026, as we finish with the plan, you can see significantly better pretax margins. And keep in mind 2 things. One, we are not making any great -- aggressive assumption on TRASM. In fact, I would call this somewhat conservative. So even in a world where we're down 4% in 2023 and down 1%, so we're not even back to pre-COVID TRASM levels by 2026, we're able to achieve significantly better margins by then. We expect, as I said, CASM down about 4% in '23 and the real driver is being able to get CASM ex down by 8% by 2026. Let's go to the next slide. So for those of you like me that care about free cash flow, I can tell you that over the next couple of years, I do expect some modest free cash flow. But we do have one particular headwind, which is 2023 CapEx. But even with that, on average, I think, we'll achieve some modest free cash flow. But more importantly, as we get to 2026, we will have free cash flow significantly better than where we were pre-COVID. So the metric we're going to start talking about is free cash flow conversion, what percentage of our net income, adjusted net income will turn into free cash flow. And we are confident that by 2026, we can hit 80% and that in a steady state environment, we will be able to target that beyond 2026. Let's go on to the next slide. So the balance sheet will continue to improve between now and 2023. I don't expect adjusted net debt to be significantly different from where it is today, but then improving by 2026. And as we get back to the pre-COVID levels or better, because earnings improve, because we're dealing with a larger asset base, generating more earnings, even at the same adjusted net debt that we were in 2019, our leverage ratios will be significantly better than they were. So we expect by 2026 to be under 2.5x adjusted total debt to EBITDAR. Let's go on to the next slide. So as I said at the start, we've spent a lot of time on this plan and are incredibly confident that this is the right thing. This will drive significantly more profitability than where we've been and what we've been doing, and we can't do nothing. We have flexibility so that we can bank one way or another depending on macro environment, but we have the uniquely United opportunities, particularly with gauge. As Andrew said, we're really the last to focus on that. Every other airline has already pulled this lever. This lever is uniquely ours to pull. We will capture the premium revenue. And I hope if nothing else to take away from this session is these CASM numbers are real. The math is there. And when you put it together, you can see that we're very comfortable with the targets that we've set over the next 5 years. So with that, let me invite Scott and Andrew back up, and we're happy to take any of your questions.

Scott is somewhere, I don't know.

Scott?

All right. Well, Andrew and me -- Scott will be here in a minute.

We can start. Go ahead.

Mike Linenberg, Deutsche Bank. Andrew, actually, 2 questions to you. You showed the international margin advantage of United relative to your peers. Can you just remind us from a domestic perspective, where you were in 2019 because I feel like that that's the most opportunity and upside. And then on the second question, your connectivity, what percent of maybe passengers connected in 2019 and where that number could go and...

Sure. I don't know if we've actually revealed the specific margin number. I think what I said, maybe to an answer -- a question that Jamie had, it was we were 2 to 3 points for international behind domestic. And it's interesting to the cycle of doing this for a number of years. There have been eras where international margins have been dramatically superior to domestic and then vice versa. And we were clearly in an era where for a number of reasons, and particularly, I think it was just capacity growth by foreign competitors, where international kind of fell behind domestic and domestic had all kinds of things that happened that made margins look pretty good. And again, we see the structural change going on as potentially an opportunity. I don't know, internationally far ahead of domestic when it's all said and done. But we see that gap closing and international going back to something more normal over time. So we're pretty optimistic about that. In terms of connectivity, it really is when you average it out, you miss a lot of the details. Our mid-con hubs have a high level of connectivity, although nowhere near the 80-plus percent that other hubs I've seen in the recent past have. So we're not getting into that level of connectivity, quite frankly, in terms of our revenue mix, but we're going to move it up dramatically from where we are today. Our coastal hubs are more reliant on local business and they will continue to be. But we will unconstrain the feed to feed our long-haul global flights. So you'll see the number go up. But I don't think it's a dramatic change in that number. New York is just organic local market, and we will always be focused on New York City local business for our New York hub more than we are definitely on the domestic connecting traffic. But we want to make sure, if you're going from Greensboro to Tel Aviv, there's a way to get you through New York, and this plan is going to let us do that.

Jamie?

Jamie Baker with JPMorgan. So 2 questions. Scott, I haven't checked my e-mail, but I assume there's going to be inquiries from investors. United is going premium. They are segmenting the product. How is this anything other than a retreat from ultra-low-cost carrier competition? How is this anything other than capitulation on United's part? I know how I'll answer that question, but I'd love to hear how you will. And I have one more after that.

Yes. It's exactly the opposite. The biggest challenge we have with competing with low-cost carriers is we fly small gauge airplanes that are high cost. Gerry's told you, these are sub-$0.06 CASM airports. What we will be doing -- and by the way, we have a competitive advantage competing in our big hubs. We don't have an advantage competing in Akron to Orlando. We're not going to try to fly Akron to Orlando. But in our hubs, we have a massive advantage. We're going to have essentially the same cost for operating the airplane as low-cost carriers, and we will now be putting big airplanes. That's our -- that has been our constraint that even if we price match, we run out of seats to sell because we just sell out all the seats that we have. And that has been our big constraint. And while I said this is about airlines, and I think airlines are kind of starting to segment themselves into their competitive advantages. Our competitive advantages are in these big hubs, in these big cities. And the fact of the matter is, they won't agree with it, but a low-cost carrier trying to fly in an expensive airport, like Newark, the business model does support. The most successful low-cost carriers in the world, Southwest, by far, they are the most successful airline in the history of aviation, left Newark. Ryanair, I'd say the second most successful, doesn't try to fly to London, Heathrow. The difference is, if you fly out of Newark, in 2019, it's a $33 per passenger in [ plane ] cost. And the $9 fare model doesn't work when this is $33 just for the airport expenses. And they don't realize that yet, but our advantages are much bigger. I think ultimately, it will sort out much like it has sort of in Europe where, in a way, the big airlines are at the big expensive airports because they are more expensive. They're great airports. They're great for our customers, but they're more expensive. And what this does is give us big airplanes to fly in those markets. So we don't do that at all.

Second question. And I think, Scott, I think you pointed out on one of the calls that something really, really bad seems to happen in the airline industry every 10 years or so. So the good thing about 2026 targets is that we're not in that window. That's optimistic. Well, there is a measurable statistical likelihood that we have a U.S. recession during that period. So how well does your business plan -- how do you absorb the next non-COVID, but recessionary period? How well does it hold up based on your projections?

Well, I think the thing that you can really control is cost. And if I was an investor, I think what I would be looking at this plan is the way I would think about it is there probably will be a cycle somewhere in there. And so it's not going to be a straight line from where we were in 2019 to 2026. And if the recession happens in 2026, it probably means that our numbers are right for 2025 or 2027, timing could be off based on the cycle a little bit. But because we're going to be driving CASM ex down 8% over that cycle, that's what gives us the resilience to deal, I think, with the cycle. And I hope conservative -- I certainly think it's conservative to say RASM is not getting back to 2019 levels until at least 2026, particularly in the context of the international environment and the backdrop there. Man, I'd make a big bet on the over if anyone wants to bet it against me on that number. But that's -- I think the cost, and that's what we can control. And that's going to be, from an investor perspective, I think a very unique part of the story. We're the only airline that's going to have CASM ex down 8% over a 7-year period. And at the same time, creating a better product for customers that ought to have a RASM tailwind. But cost really is what gives us the resilience really.

Ravi Shanker from Morgan Stanley. Thanks very much for having us and it's great to see an airline in the front foot again after what we've gone through the last 18 months. So given the new premium product, 2 questions. As you said, you're already a pretty corporate-focused airline. What do you think your corporate exposure looks like by 2026, once you've rolled out the new fleet? And second, I hear your TRASM conservatism for the whole industry, that makes sense. But given your premium product push, it seems pretty conservative given what you guys can do. So A, can you give us what the bull case and the base -- or kind of what scenarios look like on TRASM going forward? And second, is there a way to do kind of like-for-like ex international what TRASM might look like kind of given once you're swapping a regional jet with a large narrow-body, what happens to TRASM on those aircraft?

I don't think I'll give all those details, but what I will -- it's good to ask, why not.

That's how we built it though.

Yes, it's all in there. What I would say is, particularly when we look at all of the other kind of ancillary revenue streams and the segmenting of selling up to Premium Plus or to Economy Plus or to first class, we are really conservative across the board in this plan to not assume that there would be significant changes. Even though we have a very, very different product mix. So there's a lot of, I think, upside left in the projections we've put forward, which is why you see that negative 1%. And internally, when we kind of look at what we really think we can achieve is a lot better than that. And again, when you -- whether it's baggage fees or seat fees or upgrade fees, all those in this model really don't take any type of step change function at all from where we are in 2019. So I'll leave you guys to work with Kristina and others to kind of figure out how much upside there is in that, but it's pretty significant. In terms of our corporate exposure, we're a highly business-centric airline today. That's going to grow a little bit. But what we're really trying to do is make sure when people do fly us, we have the ability to capture their willingness to pay, if they're wanting to upgrade to that next cabin of service, whether it's Premium Plus or Economy Plus. And today, with all these 50-seat RJs, we just do a really bad job of doing that, and it's because we don't have the product to sell. So that's all in there, and that is part of our projection. So you see that our percent economy is going down and a percent premium is clearly going up as it reflects in all those numbers. So we really believe this plan is not only achievable, but it's beatable. And we've definitely set it up from that perspective.

Two questions. First is -- Savi from Raymond James, sorry. Just as a follow-up from Jamie's question. So on the resiliency, you made a good point on costing controllable and that being kind of a good thing. But is there a plan for liquidity? Your net debt stays high for quite some time. And if we get another shock, how do you handle that?

Well, I think Scott mentioned earlier that we are going to, maybe it was on CNBC you mentioned, we were going to plan for this kind of event again. So we will have more cash on the balance sheet. We'll have more liquidity. We will be paying down debt over this period to basically have that asset base available. If we had to do what we did over the last year, we're going to want to be in a position to do that again. So even with these aircraft coming in, we will be able to manage that down over this time horizon as well, so to position ourselves to be ready if there is another event like this.

That's helpful. And then just with the upgauging strategy here, is it a function of how you're flowing the passengers through the network in the mid-con? And what's making it possible today to do this level of upgauging because I think of being able to use larger aircraft in hubs that you have a lot more seats going through that hub. So like what makes it possible today that you weren't able to do before?

So it was always possible. We just never harvested the opportunity. So the first phase of this really, given the availability of aircraft 4 years ago was to use what we had available, which was 50-seat RJs. And we did use them and it's difficult as they are to use. We drove the P&L in exactly the right direction. So you can imagine now that we've done that, we've seen what our competitor has done, and we're going to take that 50-seat RJ, and it'll be a cascade. So a MAX10 doesn't replace a 50-seat RJ, but it goes down through the whole system. So I can tell you, this is a proven recipe that Scott and I have done many times in the past, quite frankly. We're excited to do it here. We did have to start with these 50-seat RJs because it was all we had available and the lack of connectivity and depth of our schedule 4 years ago endangered us of not attracting business traffic. So we did it and we did well with it, but we can do so much better with the right aircraft type. And again, the risk profile of taking this 50-seater due in the cascade is completely different than adding an entirely new growth market. This is about upgauging. This is about gauge. It's not about adding a lot of dots to our domestic map.

It's Andrew Quach from Wolfe Research. Two questions for me. First is the CapEx guide, I assume that you buy all the aircraft and lease none?

Yes, I should have made that clear. We always assume that. So our CapEx numbers always assume that we are going to buy the aircraft because that's a separate financing decision. So we're not trying to hide any CapEx through an assumption that we're going to be leasing aircraft.

Got it. And secondly, does the cost inflation waterfall include any CVA amendments?

We do assume inflationary pressure on all of our costs, including our labor costs.

Catie O'Brien from Goldman Sachs. So maybe the first one to kind of follow on to something you're just saying, Andrew, just trying to think through some of the potential implications of competitive response to your capacity growth. I think that 2 to 4 of the points are gauge is probably a positive there. But can you just help us frame how much of that capacity may be added into airports with those capacity constraints? And then just how you're thinking about the competitive response generally?

Sure. Overall, there, again, in Newark, we operate, for example, about 430 flights per day during our peak summer period. I expect 5 years from now, we'll operate about 430 flights a day out of Newark during a peak operating period, the runways are completely full. So all of our growth in Newark needs to come through upgauging. San Francisco is not as severe as that, but it's not far behind, unfortunately. We see similar problems in Los Angeles, where our gate utilization is the highest in our system. So we do face this problem really across the board. In terms of the competitive response, this is a topic 3, 4 years ago as well. And what I would tell you is, I think most of our competitors are probably scratching their head as to why we didn't do this years ago, right? And there was a reason, and I kind of explained a little bit of it with schedule depth and things we were trying to accomplish and availability of aircraft, but I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that we would be flying a mainline jet from Newark to Atlanta as part of our normal course. It's not going to surprise them. It's part of what we should have been doing for years, and now we're going to do it. And again, this is not about dots. This is not even really about new routes. This is about taking little aircraft and making them bigger. I don't -- who knows what the competitive response is going to be for sure. I think it will be pretty minimal. Do I think there's elevated capacity in the domestic system for years to come based on everything we've seen? Yes, our competitors, I think the plans are out there, the fleet plans are out there, we all know it. This is going to position us really well and I think a very, very intensely competitive domestic market to lower our costs and be more competitive across the board, not just the high end, but at the low end. I know everybody loves to sit in the seats upfront. The seats in the back also make this equation work, and we are going to be more competitive than ever in the back of the aircraft to make that really, really clear because it is not all about premium. Premium is, in many ways, one of our structural advantages and expect us to take advantage of it. We're not going to shy away from it. But there's a lot of segments onboard that aircraft, and we're getting better and better at segmenting the demand across that.

And in case, I'd add one thing on the cost side as it relates to gates. We can implement this entire plan without adding any gates other than what we already have and what we are completing construction on. So that's one of the ways that we're achieving these cost targets because the infrastructure essentially is already there.

And before we go on, I apologize. I've got more events to go to. So I have to leave. But these guys know all the answers anyway. And we'll give you a more straightforward answer. So you prefer them anyway. So thank you all for coming out. We're excited for what this means for United, for our customers, for our employees, but also for our owners. And we know that, that is our responsibility. Thank you all.

Thanks, Scott.

It's Conor Cunningham from MKM. In terms of the flexibility you have in the 2023 -- after 2023 order book, I get the levers that you have to pull on the retirement side. But just curious about the financial metrics that you're looking at that you would need to -- like that you need to hit to achieve -- to make a change to our overall fleet? Like are we going to start talking about return on invested capital again? Is that something that we're focused on?

Yes. Let's talk about 2 different parts of this. One is aircraft that are replacements, that's a very simple calculation. Obviously, the incremental ownership cost is there, but more than offset by all the other cost savings. And so to the extent we have -- and as you know, aircraft ultimately has to be replaced. I saw an analyst report yesterday that kind of highlighted some of our, what they call it, later-life aircraft. That just has to happen, but we can do it and still save a lot of money. When we're looking at growth, incremental growth aircraft, we're going to focus on the return we can achieve on those aircraft. So it's fair to assume, call it, a 15%-ish return to justify kind of growth aircraft. And we'll kind of focus on that as we move forward with the plan.

Okay. Great. And then I think last time we talked about a plan of this big, there was a lot more talk about scope relief and what's going on there. I mean I imagine that the pilots are happy with the aircraft order that you have today. But just curious, your thoughts there, you talked about gauge, gauge, gauge. You didn't really talk about gauge at the regional side. So just curious where you stand.

Yes. This plan for now doesn't assume any changes in scope at United Airlines. So it works within that context. Obviously, the CRJ-550 is a unique product that we've created to kind of deal with that situation. So when you add the 550 to our 76-seat scope, the number of dual class RJs that we have available to ourselves is, I think, 329, if I remember the exact number. And so we think that it's a good number. There's no doubt that we would love to have a few more 76 seaters in the fleet. We think that would help all of the things we're talking about here today. But there is no assumption at this point of anything other than our current scope plus.

Catie O'Brien from Goldman Sachs again. One on costs. So might one silver lining of the pandemic be that United's push to use technology to increase productivity actually be lining up with customer preferences a bit more than it was pre-COVID? And then how does technology play a role in that $1.3 billion in labor structural cost savings?

So maybe both can answer this, but I'll start. So the technology is critical to achieving the productivity. And we've been working on that even pre-COVID, but we've been able to accelerate that and implement -- and start to implement throughout the company, even in my organization, being able to have better financial tools. So we're relying less on analysts working spreadsheets because it can be automated. Frontline, we have things like agent on-demand and the tools necessary for single-agent gates that, as I said earlier, allows us to do more with less. And so it's an absolutely critical component to those savings. But it's not something that we're looking at in the future. We're doing it right now.

I think the single-agent boarding is really a great example of this. You just couldn't board a narrowbody aircraft to one agent without the technology to do all of the clearing of the nonrev list and things like that. And our tech team has kind of built that all and has allowed us to move smoothly to single-agent boarding and just really critical. And then again, agent on demand, there could be an agent in Tulsa that doesn't have anything to do with that particular moment in time because there's no flight activity in Tulsa, but there could be a weather event in Chicago and go -- you can go up to the QR code, scan it and then you can talk to an agent somewhere else in the system, which we think is really impressive. There's a long list of these ideas. And you could see our productivity number that Gerry showed you earlier. So we're really focused on this and our digital team is constantly working on refining ideas. The other good example is when there is a mechanical problem on aircraft, our mechanics carry iPads. They can request the parts from those iPads and they can clear the flight to depart from those iPads, where it used to be the log book and all the paper going back and forth. You could see the mechanic going in and out of the aircraft, and you're saying, when are we going to leave. If you fly United, you don't see that anymore. And so there's just so much more to come on this front, and we really just only scratched the surface, I think. So expect a lot more and our digital team is just so energized to deliver these products as well.

David Vernon from Bernstein. Thanks for hosting us today, and good to see you all. A question for you on the gauge. It looks like based on the aircraft delivery schedule, more of the larger capacity narrow-bodies are going to come in sort of in the '23 to '26 time frame. How should we think about that extra capacity growth impacting your TRASM trajectory? If you were to think about sort of where we're going to be going from here to '23, then '23 to '26, is there going to be some pressure that's created by that unique capacity that you're bringing into your own network? Or is that truly just a conservative sort of look at 1% down-ish TRASM?

I think it's a conservative look, but you are correct. The bigger, large gauge narrow bodies are heavily weighted towards '23 and beyond for the MAX10 which is about a 189-seat jet and the A321, which is a little bit bigger. So the RASM pressures from the capacity are different at different times. That being said, in the short run, there -- to me, there's a lot of domestic capacity being added to the system, excluding United Airlines for a second. And that's reflected in the outlook that we showed you for the 2023 RASM guide that we've put out there that there's a lot of moving pieces. The premium aspects of all this, the segmentation, a lot of that magic, including the retirement of the bulk of the 50 seaters occurs in '23 and beyond, not in '22 or the first half of '23, just based on how we laid it out based on deliveries.

All right. And then maybe just as a quick follow-up. You mentioned you're not adding dots to the map. Is the removal of the RJs going to lead to some reduction of scheduled breadth as you look out into that '23, '26 time frame?

It's -- the answer is we don't expect much. And the reason would be in smaller communities across the country, to be frank, United -- if you were to rank the legacy carriers, United would be 3rd. And that's just -- we have a lot of structural advantage at United. In smaller communities, we are on the smaller side. So we are going to be upgauging the smaller communities as well, not with a MAX10, but with a 76 seater and keeping our schedule quality, I think, very consistent in those cities. You're not going to see it go up a lot. You're not going to also see it go down a lot based on the plan that we've put together. And again, that's a reflection of who we are in some of these smaller communities. We can do a lot better. But we also don't expect that we're going to match the schedule depth of our primary competitors in those type of markets. We're not -- to be very clear, we're not trying to be all things to all people, that just doesn't work. But we are very focused on where our structural advantages are. And in small communities, we're going to keep what we have, but we also know we're probably not going to bridge that entire gap.

Steve Trent from Citi. I apologize if I missed this earlier, but when I looked at your forecast for EBITDA and pretax margin, any high-level color with respect to what are your inputs with respect to fuel price assumptions and taxation and that kind of thing?

For fuel, we do what we always do, we just take the forward curve and assume -- use that for the assumptions.

The prices are in the appendix.

And I can't help but mention because we hit on this so much over the last 4 or 5 years, we really think that fuel has become a pass-through in our business. So we no longer want to see these ups and downs. We just -- I no longer -- I still worry because that's my job I worry. But it's not nearly to the extent of 10 years ago where this increase -- where the price of fuel went up and fares didn't go up or the price of fuel -- and so it was disconnected. We think they are connected now and it provides a hedge. So as the economy improves, as we come out of COVID, the fact that the price of oil is going up should be no surprise to all of us, right? And so I feel really good about where we stand as an airline and as an industry about fuel and its impact on our bottom line further run rate.

So strategically speaking, one can expect you guys to manage this through pricing and, of course, a much more modern fleet coming?

A much more modern fleet that's incredibly fuel efficient, by the way.

Doug Runte, Deutsche Bank. You mentioned your large wide-body fleet and the improvements that you've made. It sounds like the 777s are coming back. But Gerry, as you said, all airplanes ultimately need to be replaced. The dog that didn't bark today, wide-body order, when do you see the need for replacement wide-bodies? And to what degree would you consider used wide-bodies as you've made aggressive use of secondhand narrow-bodies? When do they need to be delivered? When might be they be ordered? What about secondhand?

I'll start.

Go ahead.

So certainly, in this time frame we're talking about, there's no need for any replacements on the wide-body side. Andrew can talk about the amazing advantages we have with our 767 fleet, for example, which is probably our oldest wide-body fleet. But what we're doing with that fleet, we're going to keep those going for a while. So there's no need during this time frame to replace really any of the wide-body aircraft that we have. In terms of the need for incremental wide-bodies, whether used versus new, I think I ran some numbers not too long ago about whether or not a -- because 777 is -- there are other airlines that are retiring, aircraft like 777 aircraft. This may be an exaggeration, but even if that aircraft is free, given that we have to spend the money to bring it into our system and in particular, do all the work on the interior to be able to provide the Polaris product and all that, I think even if it was free, I'd rather have a new 787.

It's a -- for our maintenance team, it's a gigantic burden to induct used wide-body aircraft. We have to rip the entire interior of the aircraft out in all circumstances. Even the galleys tend to have the wrong carts. So I mean it's just something you think would be standardized across our entire business and you find out the galley cart's off by an inch or something silly, you have to wipe out an entire galley. What I would say is, just remember, we just took delivery of 29 new wide-body jets since the summer of '19 versus the summer of 2022. So we have more than a few to grow our international franchise, and we think the timing is just absolutely perfect, quite honestly, to do that. We've had many conversations with our maintenance and engineering folks about how to extend the life of our wide-bodies beyond 30 years. So that is something we're talking about regularly. It is possible. The interiors of these aircraft, by the way, look brand-new. We have 767s that are approaching 30 and we have 767s that are 20 years old, they all have the same reliability. There's not a difference. We look at it by tail, there is not a difference between the 30-year-old 767 and the 20-year-old 767 when we fly it out there on the line and nor do our customers at this point know because we work to make sure the interiors are identical on these aircraft. So there's a lot of thinking going on at United in terms of how long a wide-body can fly for. The 747 retired at 21 years because it had 4 engines, and it was just the wrong aircraft for United. It's not because 21 years is a magical date for a wide-body jet.

Brandon Oglenski from Barclays. And thanks for having this meeting. Can we come back to the minimum liquidity question from earlier. And I guess the flexibility that you've built into this plan on the balance sheet because this is a volatile business. Can you tell investors today that the risk of further equity dilution could be off the table, even in maybe some more trying times, if that were to come about for the course of the next 3 to 4 years?

So I guess the only thing I can say is that in the plan and the numbers that we've talked about today, there actually is no assumed significant equity issuance, putting aside employee plans. But -- so in the numbers you saw, there isn't anything. Now whether or not we issue equity in the future, there are just a number of factors that we all have to look at, but the numbers you saw today did not assume any equity issuance.

And can you speak to the minimum level of liquidity that you think you need to operate the airline going forward?

Well, to operate the airline is one thing, to be ready for the next pandemic like event is something else. We haven't sort of coalesced around a number yet. I can tell you my own personal view and looking at the numbers that we shared today, if in the past, our target was call it $6-ish billion of liquidity, that number has got to be north of $10 billion, I would think, maybe not a lot north of $10 billion. But that's the order of magnitude difference that I would feel comfortable with anyway getting -- being able to be positioned for another event like what we just went through. But it's not just the liquidity on hand, which is a combination of cash plus our undrawn revolver. It's also the ability to raise capital. And one of the things we learned in this process was there are -- well, one thing we were able to raise a lot of capital with the help of a number of smart bankers that are actually in the room with us today, but being able to do that again. And so as we look at debt that we're going to be paying down, being in a position to have the right assets available. So if we had to quickly do what we did last year to raise liquidity that we can do that. And I think investors have felt comfortable with the transactions that we did have all been hugely successful, both for us and for investors that they are comfortable, whether it's the MileagePlus transaction, or the route slots deal that we did, where we effectively pledged the international franchise. Those are the kinds of assets that to the extent we have capacity to borrow off of those assets going into a crisis, that's going to dictate sort of how much liquidity do we want in addition to that availability.

Bert Subin from Stifel. Does your plan assume a doubling of EBITDA? Or is that just pure upside?

From the loyalty program? As I said a few moments ago, for all of those other revenue items, whether it's ancillary fees for upsales, or cargo or the co-brand or the loyalty program, we assume kind of like normalized trajectory. We haven't made a step function change here. We wanted to provide you and show you a financial outlook that is incredibly conservative. Obviously, Scott has given us this very significant goal for the loyalty program, which we're well aware of because he talks about it to us every day. And we do think there's a lot of upside there. But that's something that we're still working on in a lot of detail, and there's hopefully more to come. But everything in the model you've seen today, whether it's baggage fees or upsells for different product types or cargo or the loyalty program is kind of very much status quo, which is why you see that negative 1% at the end of the horizon. We did that purposely. We didn't want to have to bake in a lot of heroic assumptions in any way related to anything here. This is a very realistic plan. Hopefully, that comes across to everybody today.

All right. We have time for one last question.

Mr. Linenberg is the one here. It's probably going to be a very long question.

No, no, this will be a short one, this will be a short one. Just on Gerry's point about having the right assets available and as it relates to liquidity, given that and the fact that you do have a lot of high-quality airplanes coming in that we know are readily financeable, how should we think about, and I realize it's probably rough at this point, what you're going to put on the balance sheet of those airplanes versus what that you end up leasing? Any sort of early sort of feels about that?

No, I think it's sort of too soon to tell about -- well, look, as I said earlier, even if we lease an aircraft, we view that as sort of on the balance sheet also. So to the extent we finance aircraft, and I really believe some of these aircraft, we will just pay cash for and we will finance some. That's a decision we'll make just based on where we can find more attractive financing. We've been doing some amount of leasing recently because it's been attractive. But it's too soon to sort of say what the mix might be.

Maybe I'll just wrap it up. Thanks to everybody for coming today. I believe this is the first event, non-outside event -- or outside event in the NASDAQ facility here since the pandemic started. So that's pretty significant. We're an airline. We like to connect people and unite the world and getting you back in your offices and having you show up today, I think is just a sign that shows we're all moving in the right direction back to a sense of normalcy. Normally, when airlines order aircraft, you see a press release and it says we're getting all these beautiful new aircraft, and then you move on. And what we tried to put in context today is this is a lot more than just an aircraft order. We're on a journey. We've been laying the foundation for this for years. Hopefully, that's obvious at this point. But this is about taking advantage of these amazing structural advantages we have as an airline, and we're going to do it really well. We're going to focus on our high ground. We're going to really put the customer at the center of everything we do, but we also are going to compete against -- across all customer types here. And these larger aircraft allow us to do that. We're going to lower our costs dramatically, while we, at the same time, enhance the quality of our service dramatically, that's a really great place to be. A lot of airlines have pulled certain of these triggers in the past, and they're baked into the results, I guess, upside. The great thing about where we are is we can now pull these triggers. We have confidence in pulling these triggers. In many cases, it's a proven recipe. So you don't have to believe us, you can believe the results that you've seen over the years and that really positions us to really have this enormous tailwind, recognizing what we do well, recognize what gauge means to the airline and how this is going to drive ourselves forward. And the other thing that I think for the first time we really talked about today is the unique advantages of our global network. We've always kind of said that at a high level, but we've never really filled in the picture for you today. So hopefully, with the -- when you see the level of flat beds, the hub premium demand we have, you have a better idea how that fits into our overall picture as a company and how that connects to the domestic system and how it all works together to get to these financial results that we've talked about. As Scott always tells us, there's a no excuse philosophy at United. So we're going to deliver these numbers. This industry occasionally has these events, and we'll work through them as we work through this pandemic, obviously, but we're incredibly bullish and excited. This is a lot more than a fleet plan that we explained today. And hopefully, again, that came across loud and clear. And I just wanted to thank everybody for showing up today. We'll continue to obviously do this and provide updates as we normally do. And obviously, Kristina and the team have even more details, if you can provide them from their notebooks. I'm sure they'll give you what you need as well. So Gerry, do you want to...

No, just again, thanks, everybody, for attending, particularly those in person. Hope next time, we'll have an even bigger crowd. So thank you.

Thanks, everybody.