Hello and welcome to the Global Crossing Company webcast. My name is Ben Shamsian, Vice President at Lytham Partners, and today Ryan Goepel, President and CFO of Global Crossing will be taking us through the slide presentation. Global Crossing trades under JETMF on the OTC, and with that, let's get started. Ryan, welcome.
Great, thanks, Ben. I appreciate the time and I appreciate everyone taking a moment to kind of hear our story. Before we get started, I'll put in the normal disclosure language regarding the forward-looking statements, and we'll move right into the presentation. Global Crossing Airlines, Global X as we refer to it, is the fastest growing charter airline in North America, setting the industry standard for on-time performance and reliability. That's really a focus of ours operationally, because it does you no good to get one charter if you can't get the second. The best way to get the repeat business is to show up on time and have a reliable product, which is, I think, been a key focus of ours since we started.
I think it's one of the reasons you've seen such rapid growth in not only the number of hours we've operated, the number of customers we have, and the ability to deliver the results that I think we've been able to deliver over the last couple of years. Who are we and where did we start and become? This started back, we launched this in February of 2020. If you could think back through history of February 2020, what the world looked like and what it rapidly became. Starting an airline at that time was a different kind of proposition. I also think it kind of goes to the DNA of the organization and our kind of resourcefulness and our ability to adapt to the changing market conditions, changing environments, and really to carve out a business that we think is we're very, very happy with today.
We started in February 2020. We launched revenue flights in August of 2021. We went through the certification process with the FAA. We launched our first revenue flights in August 2021. By the end of 2022, we had grown to six aircraft. We also added certifications for IOSA, NCAA, started flying for the NCAA, and did a lot of our Cuba flights. By the end of 2023, we'd grown to eight aircraft. We started doing some of our U.S. government work. We started expanding into Europe and starting our cargo operations. By the end of 2024, we were up to 14 aircraft. In February, Chris Jamroz was appointed Executive Chairman. I was moved from CFO to CFO and President. To be clear, I was here in February, so I've been here through the whole journey, which has been a great ride for myself.
Finally, in 2025, where we are currently with 19 aircraft and continuing to grow. If you look at the market size that we're looking to tackle, aviation is a massive market, a multi-billion-dollar market. We believe the charter market for both cargo and passenger is a multi-billion-dollar market. If you look at our revenue from 2024, we have a very small slice of it. The best way to think for myself of aviation in North America is if aviation is a fishbowl and the scheduled carriers like Delta, United, and American are marbles, we're kind of the water. We go into the gaps in between the marbles, and that's really where we want to carve out what we think is a pretty important niche, but recognize that niches in this business are billion-dollar niches. They're not tens of millions.
We are very excited about the niche we've carved out. We think that's one of the reasons we've been successful, and I'll walk you through sort of our progress and what we're doing. When most people think airlines, they think of scheduled carrier like Delta. We're what we call an ACMI operator. It comes down to risk and business model. If you look at a scheduled carrier, what they do is they publish a schedule. Once the schedule is published, about 90% of their costs are fixed, and it's all about managing operating costs, fuel prices, ticket sales, ticket prices, yield proceed. They take a lot of risk, and you need huge scale in order for this to work.
For example, they take ticket risk, they take fuel risk, they take crew cost, they have billing risk, and the kind of aircraft they need to make the schedule work tend to be brand new and very, very expensive. Conversely, our business model is we sell the whole plane, right? Whether you bring one passenger, 150, or 200 passengers, it's the same kind of revenue for us. Fuel cost is a pass through to the passenger, crew cost is a pass through to the customer, and billing we charge by the hour. Whereas a scheduled carrier sells a seat, we charge by the hour for the whole plane. We have a lower utilization model, so we tend to target between 100 and 150 hours a month.
As a result, we can use lower cost, older aircraft, lower cost aircraft, which is in our way how the whole model works for us. When we do sell, we sell it under two business models, really. To us, we're indifferent as to how we sell it. It's just a matter of accounting. We talk about ACMI, which is aircraft, crew, maintenance, and insurance. In that case, we just sort of sell that. We sell the plane with the crew, a maintained aircraft, and an insured aircraft. If we sell a charter, we'll sell the ACMI plus, we'll charge them for all the fuel, landing, other operational expenses. What ends up happening in the end is an ACMI hour tends to be about 1/2 or 40% lower in revenue than a charter hour, but the margins are higher because we have fewer pass-through costs.
One of the things we'll talk about in our revenue report when we talk about we hit certain revenue is what was the mix? What percent of the business was ACMI? What percent of the business was charter? One of the reasons we like to focus on ACMI is it requires less working capital. It tends to have more minimum hour commitments, whereas a charter flight might be just a one-off. You'll sort of see as we've evolved as a company, the predictability and the higher utilization of an ACMI contract tends to be where we're focused. Where we've looked at where we've grown, we started here in Miami, Florida. We've established bases since then in Alexandria, Louisiana, and Harlingen, Texas. We can basically move the aircraft to wherever a customer needs us to be.
By having bases in Louisiana and Texas, it allows us to service a bigger part of the U.S. with limited relocation costs and allows us to recover from any sort of operations that we have. To put an idea, the scope of what we've done since 2021, we've operated to 66 countries and over 404 cities. What this really demonstrates is we're effectively a plane for hire. We are a plane that you can hire to charter, and we can effectively operate almost anywhere in the world and have operated in a significant number of countries in the world, which we think is really a differentiator and what's different than a scheduled service. Where a scheduled service would have to set up an infrastructure, sell tickets, we can do a one-off flight to Greenland. We can do a one-off flight to Sweden, which we have done and continue to do.
One of the key drivers of our value and what will be the key driver of our returns is the number of aircraft we have. Adding an aircraft is no small feat. I think when you think about our economic driver, what's the key driver of revenue, what a key driver of profit is the number of aircraft we have. We kind of have a saying here where we sort of talk to them about as if they're kind of like restaurants, how a restaurant would or a Starbucks would open a new Starbucks, and that'll kind of help generate the revenue that's needed to get through to grow the business. The growth of our fleet and the ability to add aircraft to our fleet, the ability to continue to add aircraft is going to be a key metric for us and is a key driver of revenue and growth.
As you can see, we started with one aircraft on day one. We've grown to eight, 14, 19, and the goal is to be at 22 by the end of the year. I'll go quickly into some of our financial results because I think it's important, especially in the micro-cap space. There's a lot of time talked about what you're going to do, what your potential is, and don't get us wrong. We do that. We've now established a significant track record since August of 2021 of demonstrating revenue growth and financial performance. I think that's a key differentiator, I think, in this space that we're trading in. For Q2, revenue was up 7% to $61 million, with EBITDA up 6% to $19.8 million. EBITDA is a metric used in aviation, which is just EBITDA plus rent.
The reason why you would look at that is because if you owned all your aircraft and different airlines have different ownership models, all of your aircraft costs would flow through cap depreciation and amortization, where we have an all-lease model, which requires less capital upfront, but all our costs flow through R, which is rent. If you're going to compare the EBITDA of a lease fleet to an EBITDA of an owned fleet, they're not comparable at all, which is why many people look at EBITDA. That being said, our ultimate metric and the thing we're most focused on is net income and earnings per share. Our investors don't necessarily care how it's structured above that. What we need to do is generate positive cash from operations and make a profit. That's really what we focus on.
In order to compare it and do valuations and to look at different airlines, you really need to understand the EBITDA. The ownership structure is taken out. When you look at Q2, again, we generated $61.4 million in revenue, $19.8 million of EBITDA. We operated 8,065 block hours. When we look at other airlines, they talk about available seat miles. They'll talk about chasm. They'll talk about tickets sold. Again, that's not really a relevant metric for our business model. What's relevant is for how many hours did we fly. We are effectively a service company, and how many hours you operate is a direct tie to how much revenue you're going to generate and how much profit you're going to be. Aircraft utilization is how many hours can you fly per aircraft per quarter.
We achieve 471 hours per aircraft per quarter, which is right on target with our goals around 450 per aircraft on average. This is a bit above, which is why I think we saw the results we did. Cash equivalence at the end of Q2 was $14.1 million, and our fleet size was 19 aircraft. Speaking of EBITDA and how this works out, as you can sort of see, there's a bit of seasonality to our business. Going back to Q1 of 2024, we've generated positive EBITDA. We've generated positive EBITDA prior to that, but we're just going back, you know, six quarters. You can sort of see there's a growth to our EBITDA. It's up and to the right, which is the goal. The goal is to how do you optimize your EBITDA per block hour. Where that becomes relevant is it's one thing to grow the business.
It's another thing to grow the overall returns of the business. Are you growing in an efficient fleet? I think one of the takeaways from this is, one, you sort of see a bit of the seasonalities we have on the different quarters, but also our ability to add capacity, to add hours, and not have margin compression, which really goes to the strength, I think, of the market we're operating in. Looking at our quarterly block hours and revenue, you again can see we've operated Q3 tends to be a high block hour group for us. We started in Q1 of 2022 with 1,700 block hours, which at the time I thought was massive. Looking forward, you can see everything's going up and to the right, which is the goal. The block hours are going up and to the right. The revenue is going up and to the right.
We're really trying to create a track record of demonstrated performance to give people comfort so they can forecast out what we think we might be worth. When you think about where our growth is going to come from and where our opportunities are in the business segment, the first part is growing the fleet. Right? We're talking about adding, and we've mentioned this before in our earnings releases, we're going to add one 320, and we've signed a lease for another four 319s, which will hopefully add throughout the end of this year and into the early part of next year, which will get 20% fleet growth for the year. We're driving improved utilization through emphasizing high margin ACMI business. With the ACMI, you tend to get better utilization, higher number of hours per month. It's a little more predictable.
We currently have eight aircraft operating on government contracts since April of 2024, providing us consistent, predictable, and reliable foundation of revenue. When we look at EMEA, which is Europe effectively, currently only 5% of our revenue comes out of Europe. The ACMI market in Europe is several hundred aircraft. We have two, three this year, two in the previous years operating in that space. That's a market that we think we can expand and grow as we add more aircraft. The reason we haven't focused on it now is we've seen such significant demand and opportunity in America. One of the things, one of the mantras we're really trying to drive as a company is keep it simple. It's really easy to get complicated in aviation. EMEA is a very difficult business. It's highly regulated. There's a ton of moving parts, literally and figuratively.
One of the focuses we've been on since I became President is really how do you focus the business? How do you simplify what we do, become bigger and better at our core business? As that expands, you can expand into other markets. A key market for us will be Europe. A second place that we believe is a key core expansion is the cargo. We started cargo operations about two years ago. It has been a relatively weak market, an underperformer for us. However, when you look forward and you look at where our growth is going to come in the next five to 10 years, we're the only Airbus freight operator on the narrowbody side in North America. We're the only airline with the A321F cargo aircraft to operate flights.
We think it is the most fuel-efficient, the most efficient cargo aircraft for package carriers, which is perfectly tailored for the e-commerce business, which is where the current amount of growth is going to be and continue to be. That's another lever of growth that we have, which isn't a distraction. It's kind of our core business. We have four aircraft in cargo now, and we have the ability to expand that to 10, 20, 30, 40 over the next decade as demand picks up in that space. Finally, one of the aspects we've kind of started to do is up until this quarter, every aircraft we've had is leased. We started a transition to a hybrid ownership structure with our first acquisition of an Airbus A320 in July of 2025. We did this for a lot of reasons.
One being it was a very good deal or structure for the company. It enhances operational flexibility, creates tangible assets on our balance sheet, and supports improved financial performance. The other aspect of it is we usually get aircraft at mid to end of life, and by owning the aircraft, we can control what is very valuable end-of-life economics. We think that's really important for us going forward. We think this is going to help drive increased EBITDA, increased earnings, and better cash positions for us versus leasing as the opportunities present itself. Really excited we're able to close that transaction. It was an existing leased aircraft we converted to an owned aircraft, and we're going to continue to do that over the next two to three years, which again will drive a stronger balance sheet, more operational flexibility, and better income, net income, and EBITDA for us going forward.
We're going to look to the investment highlights. I realize I went through this quickly, but I think when we think about what the story is, we are the nation's fastest growing charter airline. We are effectively one of the largest charter airlines in the narrowbody space, operating more hours than any one other operator, which I think is getting us an advantage with customers in not only scale, but efficiency and reliability. Our financial profile is ever-improving since we started. I've been here since the very early days, and as we continue to add aircraft and deliver results, generate strong cash flow from operations, I think that just gives investors more comfort as they look to value us. We're trying to create a track record of consistent results for the last five quarters since the change in management has delivered positive EBITDA.
The one quarter that was negative, it was almost break-even. In Q2, we generated almost $9 million in cash flow from operations, which was one of the best quarters we've ever had. When you look at where it looks like on the return basis, in Q, and on an EBITDA basis, in Q, in 2023, we did $20 million. Last year, we did $62 million. In the first half of this year, we did $40 million. Extremely fast growth, large growth, which I think is really important. A continued track record of it, I think, makes this a pretty attractive opportunity for those interested. Finally, our cap table. I think one of the things we've really prided ourselves on is not diluting ourselves. We haven't issued really any equity since April of 2021, which is, outside of RSUs and RSUs. It's a pretty tight share cap structure.
Employee ownership is actually pretty high. We do an employee share purchase plan. We've done it since 2021. Over 300 employees participate. I'd estimate about 5% of our issued common shares are owned by employees who've participated in this program. Also, we've been pretty, as a compensation metric, to keep salaries and such costs down. We've issued RSUs, which have multiple-year vesting periods as a retention tool. Ensuring our employees are aligned with our goals, ensuring they're aligned with shareholders, has always been a priority for the company. I think it's one of our strengths going forward. I think we have a pretty good cap table. It's not complicated. A lot of these shares are traded. I think it represents kind of the opportunity we have going forward. With that, that's kind of our overview presentation. I want to thank Ben for hosting us and letting us present. I'll turn it over to you.
All right. Thank you, Ryan, and thank you, everyone, for watching. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with Global Crossing send me an email at shamsian@lythampartners.com. That's shamsian@lythampartners.com. We have additional presentations and fireside chats coming up next, so please stick around for more. Thank you. Have a great rest of the day.