Please utilize the Q&A icons to submit questions, and I'll present them to management. With that said, Ryan, thank you for being with us. The floor is yours.
Great. Thank you, John. My name is Ryan Goepel. As mentioned, I'm a President and CFO. I've been employed with Global Crossing since the very, very beginning. I started in February of 2020, and I guess since this is an equity audience, I think the best way to kind of describe us is, you know, we are effectively trading at two times EBITDA, and one of our peers just got sold for 6.9 x EBITDA, so putting that in context, the next question is, why is there such a difference? Why are your peers at that rate and you're at this rate? I'll save you the mystery. I have no idea.
But what we are going to focus on is sort of talk through who we are, what we do, and why we think this is a really good opportunity for those of you who are looking for a new investment. So who are we? Global Crossing is the nation's fastest growing chartered airline. We operate the Airbus family of aircraft. What that is, is if you're familiar with aviation or not, it's when you get on a plane and it's got the three, it's a single aisle, three seats on either side. There's two planes that compete in that: the Airbus A320s and the 737s. So we operate the Airbus family of aircraft. We operate them on a charter basis, and I'll go into that, what that means. We've been established in the United States. We started in around February when I started in 2020.
We got certified as an airline in August of 2021, starting with one aircraft. And since then, we've grown to our current 18 aircraft that we have operating today, with plans to grow going forward. Next slide. Speaking of our milestones, you know, we've been building quite a track record, and there's a lot of things that have happened. When we think about what an airline is and what a company is to operate, you know, we really, we're comprised of three primary assets. The first asset is the aircraft. Currently, we lease all but one of our aircraft, or one of our aircraft is owned. The rest are leased. So that's in aviation, most people think, "Well, how many aircraft do you have?" Well, that's one part. In order to fly a flight, you need three things. You need the aircraft. The second thing you need is crew.
You know, when you look at crews, that's both pilot, co-pilot, purser, and flight attendants, and for us, a flight mechanic. All of those people need to be hired, trained, and put on board. They're all employees. None of them are contractors. They all go through our training program, and they're all trained in the way our manuals and everything are written. And that's a significant investment. We have around 150 pilots. We've got about 40 flight mechanics. We have over almost 200 flight attendants, so that we are flight cabin crew, sorry, that we use to operate our flights. We also. The third part that's required to operate as an airline is the certification. And the certification is not only a huge barrier to entry for new entrants, it also allows you the opportunity to expand into other markets and for other customer bases.
So initially, we got what's called an FAA certification under 121. 121 is the highest standard of certification that the FAA can grant. It's the same level as Delta, United and any of the majors. And that's really dictated by the size of the aircraft that you operate. We've got that in August of 2021, which allows us to operate within the United States as a charter, as a flag carrier, and as a—not scheduled, but domestic and international. Other certifications we've gotten over the years that are pretty important. One is IOSA. IOSA is the highest. It's an international body that performs audits on airlines around the world. To get certified by IOSA, you have to go through a pretty brutal audit process and meet their standards, which we have. We're in the process of renewing that.
The benefit of that is if another airline wants to hire us to fly for them, they can rely on the IOSA audit for due diligence to allow us to operate for them, which saves a significant amount of time, and that has, one of the reasons we've been able to get some of the clients we've been able to get. Another certification we have is EASA, so EASA is the European equivalent of the FAA, and it's called a TCO, which is the Third Country Operator, which allows us to operate in Europe. Now, when we think about our business, the charter business, it's referred to as ACMI, which stands for Aircraft Crew Maintenance and Insurance. In Europe, for example, there's a lot more, ACMI is used much more broadly by the airlines over there. There's anywhere from, I think, a 300 to 400 mark aircraft market in Europe operating ACMI.
There's airlines who service that need. One of the great things I think unique to Global is since most of the flying in the United States is point-to-point inside the US, a European operator can't operate in the U.S. due to the FAA regulations. That being said, most of the flying in Europe is country to country, and using the EASA TCO, it allows us to operate in Europe. What we have is a dynamic where we can domestically create a market and be in a market where the main players in this market can't compete in, but we can compete in theirs. When you think about the charter market in the U.S. going through history, it's been around for as long as airlines have been around. It's always been in this probably 30-60 aircraft range.
I think where we are right now, uniquely, there's been a lot of. There was a lot of consolidation in the space. One of the prime competitors who had consolidated and grown to almost 40 aircraft took on effectively $1 billion worth of debt. And unfortunately, when we showed up, they didn't, they ended up shutting down, and we've, we've just kind of been a nexus of demand since then that we've been able to take advantage of. We continue to grow. We're growing as one of the fastest. We are the largest charter operator, sole charter. We do the most charter flights in the United States currently, while there's a lot of fragmented other players. Other certifications we've also gotten is Department of Defense.
That too requires a pretty rigorous audit process, approval process, which allows us to participate in the Department of Defense, I guess, Department of Defense charter flights, which is a significant market as well. So as you can see, what we've been doing since we started is we started with the base of one aircraft. We started. We built the three pillars, which forms an airline, and we've just been continually adding to it, which will allow us to scale and build our markets to more of a global market. Go to the next slide. Speaking of market size, when you think about where it is in the U.S., we believe the charter market is around $3.9 billion. For the past year, about $5.8 billion for cargo. So it's around a $9 billion revenue opportunity. In 2024, we did $223 million. So there's a significant market for us.
Yes, we are a niche player, but niches inside of aviation are pretty massive. And when you compare that to our valuation and where we are, there's a lot of runway for us to go forward. That's not the last aviation pun I'll do. If you look at our place in the industry, so one of the key differentiators we have to make, especially in the U.S., is how are we different from airlines? There's the Buffett quote that's out there that everyone talks about. Of course, after he made it, he invested in airlines. But most people, when they think of airlines, they think of a scheduled carrier: Delta, American, United, JetBlue, Spirit, to name a few. We are a charter operator, an ACMI operator, and there's some fundamental differences to the two models.
When you're a scheduled carrier, you publish a schedule, and once your schedule is published, about 90% of your costs are fixed, and your ability to make profit is based on your ability to sell tickets, what you sell the tickets for, what your fuel costs are, and then you are on the hook for billings. It's a high-risk model, and the way it's been addressed, especially in the U.S., is through scale. You look at companies like American, Delta, United; they're 1,000 aircraft. You look at Spirit and JetBlue and some of the others; they're 200-300 aircraft. So we're charter. The way we're different is we don't publish a schedule. We fly when we're hired to fly. We don't sell tickets. We sell the whole plane. Fuel is a pass-through. Crew cost is a pass-through, and so they pay by the hour.
Much like a service company, they pay by the hour. As a result, our dynamic is we look at profitability per aircraft per month. Our goal is to create between $300,000 and $400,000 of operating income per aircraft per month. Whether we fly a lot of hours at a low rate or a little bit of hours at a high rate, that's the metric that we really drive, and that's the metric we follow really close. If you look at our financial statements, you'll see our overhead is around between $4 million and $5 million a month. When you go back to doing the math on contribution margin for aircraft, you can see we're pretty close to the, and we have been pretty close to the break-even, if not slightly profitable on net income basis.
Definitely profitable on the EBITDA basis and very profitable on the EBITDA basis. The thing when we think about, and this is when we go to sell, you'll see in our financial statements, we talk about ACMI business and charter business. So ACMI just stands for Aircraft Crew Maintenance and Insurance. That revenue excludes, or that cost excludes fuel, excludes ground handling, excludes overflight fees, landing fees, and all the others. Customers like the U.S. government, customers like other airlines who have that infrastructure in place to secure those vendors will hire us on an ACMI basis. When we go to sports teams like a college basketball team or a pro sports team, they do not have that infrastructure. So we'll do it on a charter basis. So that revenue hour will probably be almost double, if not 2.5 x what an ACMI hour is.
But the difference is it's a lot of pass-through cost. So the contribution margin at the bottom is pretty much the same regardless of the mix. That's one of the reasons why revenue is a tough metric for us to look at for growth, because if you fly 1,000 hours on ACMI, you can have a $70 million business. If you fly the same 1,000 hours as charter, you have a $210 million business. But it doesn't change the profit really at the bottom. So when we talk about how to look at us, we always talk about how many block hours did we operate. What is our—you know, our block hours operated is the metric we really look at, not necessarily revenue, not necessarily number of aircraft. We can go to the next slide. So when you look at growing our fleet, effectively, we look to grow from 20.
You know, we started with one. That was a great day by the end of 2023, and then 14. The target was 19 by the end of 2024. We did not have. Now, currently, we have 20 aircraft on our certificate. We have possession of 20. 18 are authorized to fly. The reason is we returned one of our operating aircraft, and the other two are going through what we call conformity, which is the step between taking acceptance and the FAA approving it to fly for you. Our growth in aircraft was pretty flat in 2025 for the very reason that the market for aircraft and lease rates went very, very high in 2024, and we weren't willing to commit to those costs because those are six to eight-year leases, and we thought it would be a mistake to commit to that rate over six years.
I think we've seen that was the right decision because now, as we look out, rates have come down quite a bit from those 2024 highs. Currently, we have five aircraft, including the two that we already have, so three additional under lease for delivery. We're working through the conformity process to get them on board. You know, we're really focused on 2025 is how to get better utilization, how to get better profit, how to get more efficient with the fleet we had. Now we're in a position to grow it, and that's the next step going forward. Next slide. One of the things we've done to enhance efficiency is build up bases. You know, when you're a scheduled carrier, you can arbitrarily build a base by scheduling the aircraft, and that's where your base comes from.
The charter, what you want to do is have a certain amount of a nexus of volume in an area to justify building a base. A base is really where you would hire crew to live. You would hire maintenance, and in some cases, you'd have a maintenance facility and equipment there. For us, we have three bases now: Miami, Alexandria, Louisiana, and Harlingen, Texas. What this allows us to do is when we go to win charter business, since we charge the customer for the repositioned flight, having aircraft based closer where the customer is allows us to be more competitive in our bids. By having everything in Miami, it kind of limited some of our ability to compete. By having stuff in Louisiana and Texas, we'll be reopening our Arizona area. It allows us to compete more there.
And as we grow scale and we grow our customer base, we'll continue to add bases throughout the United States, which allows us to become more competitive as we go to do more charter work. Next slide. When we think about where we fly, you know, again, with a scheduled carrier for a United to open a base or a route, so a place that they're going to fly to and from, it generally takes six months, three to six months to open up a new location. And a lot of that is sales because you want to be able to sell into it and make sure you have enough volume. Conversely, with us, we go wherever our customer tells us to go. And so, as a consequence, we've flown to over 450 cities, 67 countries.
One of the ways we manage that is we put a flight tech on most of our flights. So if we're not flying between established bases, we'll put a flight tech on the base. One of the things we also work to is constantly expand our supply chain. So if a plane breaks, we have readily access to parts where the plane is. And that's something we get better at every day. But this kind of highlights, you know, that one of the things is we're not necessarily tied to, like, if I'm a scheduled carrier and I've opened a route from LA to New York, I need to invest in LA and New York, whether it's marketing expense, infrastructure expense, and then I'm kind of stuck there. And really, for us, we go where the customer says.
We're never really tied to any one route, any one economy, any one customer. The great thing about planes is they're pretty mobile. And so you can move the plane to wherever we need to go. And when you go back to the beginning and you talk about our certifications, we have the authority to operate in a very broad number of theaters and areas. We just think the best and easiest opportunities here in the U.S. And so we've really been focusing on that in the last 12 months. Next slide. So when you look at our financial numbers, you know, from Q3. This is from Q3. Q4, what we're releasing in early March, $58 million in revenue for Q3, $18.9 million EBITDA. We flew 9,900 block hours, averaged 600 hours per aircraft. None of those numbers make sense unless you are tracking us and see the rate and return.
But I think that the general message is we're moving up and to the right. You know, financial models are always great. They look like a linear line that grows up and to the right. The reality is it's more of an EKG. But again, I think we've been making progress at every effort stage. We've been going through. We go to the next slide. Again, key metrics, if you look at our EBITDA, has been relatively steady. You know, we had a big jump from 2024, and we're continuing to maintain that in 2025. And the idea is to start growing it as we add aircraft. Now, one of the things we talk about is net aircraft available. And the reason is I only can fly what's available to fly. And so one of the metrics we look at is aircraft have scheduled maintenance events.
Every two, six, and 12 years, they need to go through a pretty significant maintenance check and take anywhere from two weeks to 45 days. And then you have unscheduled maintenance, which is the stuff we look to minimize. One of the things is if you have, and we saw this in late Q2, Q3, and Q4, we had lots of scheduled maintenance because that's just how the calendar flowed. As you get bigger, you know, when I had 10 aircraft and three were in scheduled maintenance, that's 30% of my fleet. But my cost basis is still the same. The advantage of getting to 20 or 30 aircraft, if I have three down for maintenance, that drops to be 15 or 10% of my fleet, and that becomes easier to manage from an operation standpoint.
I think one of the benefits of the growth we're going to see is it's going to allow us more predictable and better cash flows as the amount of aircraft that are by design, not offline, becomes less relevant to the total number. If you go to the next slide. Again, this is the part where we talk about a number of hours operated and to really get the advantage of flying the flights. But this also highlights when I talked about the charter to ACMI mix. You've seen the hours go up and to the right, especially in 2025, but you're seeing the revenue go down. The reason you're seeing that is we're going from a lot of charter work to more ACMI work. You know, an average ACMI hour per our financials is $6,800 an hour. An average charter hour is $15,000.
The reason you do more ACMI hours is they tend to be more predictable, easier to plan, and you can be more efficient with it, whereas charter tends to be ad hoc. So the way we look at it is we take delivery of new aircraft. We generally have them working on various charter work, seeking a long-term home, I would call it, an ACMI program for them to transition to. We transitioned, I think, in Q3, 90%+ of our work was ACMI. And that was by design. I think you see in Q4, there's more charter because all the college sports is charter. And that's a pretty big segment for us that really starts in early December and runs through the end of March. Go to the next slide. So when we look at where we want to, avenues of expected growth and profitability.
We had possession of the 20. Not all 20 were flying. We were going to basically improve utilization through high-margin ACMI work, which we achieved. We currently have eight aircraft operating on government-related contracts since April of 2024. Those have minimum guarantees, and that's extended through the year. If we're looking at cargo, cargo has been a pretty weak market in North America for narrow body for the last two years. And that continues to be weak. If I was to say, if I was to be honest and look at a negative, that hasn't been a positive for us. And we're going to figure out what to do with that. But fortunately, our passenger business has been so strong that's allowed us to work. And really transitioning to a hybrid ownership model.
One of the advantages of our model and the way we operate is we operate less cycles per month. Really, every aircraft has a certain number of cycles in it before they die or require heavy maintenance. If a scheduled carrier flies 100 cycles a month and we're flying 30 cycles a month, we could take the very same older aircraft and extend its life for several years. What ends up happening is that end-of-life economics will go to the lessor, where we think if we can own the aircraft at the end of life, that's something we can retain, which I think is another upside to us for growth and profitability, which we're looking to do more of. Next slide. Again, investment highlights. You know, we are the fastest-growing charter airline. We're continuing to improve our balance sheet and improve our operations.
You sort of see the growth, the revenue growth, and the profit growth. I think you're going to continue to see that through 2026. We look at our cap table. It's pretty straightforward, straightforward in the fact we have three classes of shares. The difference between Common and Class B is Class B are non-voting, but people who own Class Bs can convert to Common at any time, one for one. Class A was part of an equity round we did in April of 2021. Those are non-voting and only can convert if the person converting owns less than 4.99% of shares. As you can imagine, that's part of reporting. But I just treat them all. SEC is the same. That's probably the best way to think about it.
We have two tranches of warrants, one that expires in April of this year, another one that goes on for until 2030. And then RSUs that are vesting over the course of, you know, for the management team. You know, I think as a result of this RSU program, about 10% of our ownership is owned by employees, which I think is a great number. And we also have an Employee Share Purchase Plan, of which I think about 3% or 4% of the shares outstanding have been purchased by employees that way too. So we have big investment from the employees, a lot of belief in what we're doing. And I think we're really excited about what we've achieved and what we're going to continue to do. And I think that's the last slide.
Okay. Thank you, Ryan.
Anybody, if you have a question, please submit it to the Q&A box, and I will present it to Ryan. Ryan, I guess I want to lead off with maybe some obvious questions, for me at least. Why exclusively Airbus A320s and not 737s? And are these planes configured to seat the, whatever, 150, 175, or do you adjust the seating based on the need as need basis?
So one of the realities of the aircraft you operate, so the OEM you work with, whether it's Boeing or Airbus, you get certified by aircraft. So you have to get each aircraft certified. The other issue, though, is once you hire pilots, a pilot can't fly for you both the Boeing and the Airbus. So one of the reasons you want to be a single aircraft operator is to maintain one pilot corps.
Now, there are advantages of eventually evolving space-wise to having both operating both the Airbus and Boeing platforms. We chose Airbus simply because it was differentiated. There were no other charter operators in the Airbus platform. We thought the availability to pilots, crews, and aircraft was going to be advantageous. It would be the right choice. I think the issues Boeing has had in the last couple of years has limited the supply of aircraft, and the fact we are an Airbus has actually benefited us quite well.
And since you touched on it just now in the response, can you talk a little bit about the turnover you have as far as pilots are concerned?
Yeah, early days. I think part of it is figuring out who wants to work. So our business model is slightly different.
We offer certain things to pilots that, you know, that other airlines don't. You know, the pay rates for senior pilots at American United and Delta will be higher than ours, but you know, it sometimes takes you 10 to 15 years to become a captain, where we have direct entry captains. A lot of our flying is there and back, so a lot of the pilots will be home at night, which is advantageous for them. We also are the highest-paying Gateway Program, and what that means is a pilot can live. Most airlines require a pilot to live in a base, and it's on their dime to get to the base to fly their flights. So if they don't live in that base, they spend a lot of time in hotels, and they don't spend, and they have to pay for themselves to get to where they want to go.
Because we fly to so many places and we're spread out so many different spots, and we wanted to have a differentiation, we have a Gateway Program, which allows pilots to be based wherever they want to be based, which provides them flexibility to live wherever they want to live, which has been appealing for a certain group of pilots. So we tend to end up with experienced captains. So if you're switching as an airline and you're in your 40s or 50s, you might never get to be a captain at a major, but you can be a captain day one for us, and the pay difference is significant. For junior pilots, we try and we will take, we hope to get three to five years out of them, but they also have a path to being captain much faster with us.
So it's different strokes for different folks, I guess. And, you know, I think as our turnover, to answer that question, as we, I think the turnover was driven before by the fact we were hiring the wrong people, not really understanding who really appreciates and likes our business model. And over the five years, we figured that out, I think. And I think the turnover has dropped considerably.
Got it. Got it. And you opened up the discussion today about EBITDA as the proper metric to evaluating a company. Can you just go back to that, and why is that the case, and maybe help people understand it?
Sure. So the reason why airlines tend to be valued on EBITDA, and this is GAAP, now, if you're an IFRS, it's different. But under GAAP, the way they treat operating leases and finance leases and ownership.
So if—and the best example is this: if I'm an airline and I own all of my aircraft, my EBITDA, all the aircraft costs will flow through the depreciation and amortization. If I lease all my aircraft, it flows through rent, which is above EBITDA, right? So if you're comparing on an EBITDA basis, which a lot of people like to do, you can't because they're not factoring in the factor of the aircraft. What ends up happening is the multiple is lower, right? So you don't get like 10 or 15 x you know, EBITDA. But they do it on an EBITDA basis because that takes out, from a financial modeling perspective, how you own the aircraft, you know, whether you own or lease it.
That's really the only way to compare an apples-to-apples because the impact on the earnings is on the EBITDA so great. EBITDA stops being really a metric for cash because you have payments. EBITDA is just, yes, it's another one of those non-GAAP metrics, but it allows you to compare yourself across different fleet ownership types. Understood. Thank you for that. Let's go to the audience here. Specific question about what happened in the third quarter of 2023 with revenue doubling. Okay. In 2023, that would have, doubling from the prior quarter, that would have been an uptick in charter revenue and additional aircraft. The biggest driver of increased revenue is really adding aircraft. You really do have to look at what percentage is ACMI and what percentage is charter.
Because you can, like I said, looking at revenue as a pure metric for us is really dangerous because I can make it look really good by just doing a ton of charter revenue, but I haven't really made any more money. So I would really look at the block hours as the activity level. You mentioned this in some of your prepared remarks about competitors filing for bankruptcy. You know, what's the flaw there? And why is that something you'll be able to avoid? Well, the great thing about, you know, there's that funny, those demotivational posters. You know, you see that sinking ship, don't let your life goal to be the warning for others. You know, I think the prior group that went and consolidated in our business, they did a lot of things right.
You know, I think for me, it's a case study in what was done wrong. You know, a couple of things, they let their fleet get too old. They didn't reinvest in their aircraft. They took on $1 billion of debt when the business couldn't justify $1 billion worth of debt. Keep in mind, we have $35 million. So that gives you kind of an idea of where we're at. I think they allowed their service delivery to kind of drop. It provided an opportunity for someone like us to emerge. We took full advantage of it. I think because of that, I'm constantly aware of who our competitors are. I'm constantly aware of new players. I'm constantly looking to not let our fleet just get old and worn out.
Because we lease all our aircraft, we pay into maintenance reserves for all these heavy maintenance events. So here's an example. Because I leased all my aircraft, we have to pay MRs. MRs are cash payments to the lessor that are held by the lessor. So when a two-year or six-year check, which is what they're kind of called, those that we get reimbursed out of the fund we paid into. If you own your aircraft, you don't have to pay into that fund. You manage it yourself. The prior competitor, they didn't have to pay anybody. They kind of kept it in the pool. It got swept. So when the maintenance events happened, they had no capital to go fix the plane. The plane becomes grounded. Once the plane becomes grounded, you now have a death spiral.
So I think as a startup and a young airline, while painful to pay these MRs, it is actually a good discipline that the money is out and it's recorded out the door. And there's massive - I don't know how much is really - there's probably $30 million-$40 million worth of MRs that have been paid to our lessors to cover the heavy maintenance checks that we have coming and scheduled. Question is, what do you think the optimal mix of owned versus leased aircraft will be for your company? Depends on the price. I think if I had unlimited capital, I'd own them all. Because why wouldn't you want to control the asset? And the question is at what price, right?
Because the thing is, if I own, you know, asset-backed lending is if you can get it for SOFR + two or three, that's a lot better than, you know, secured debt at 15%, which we have, you know, on our senior note, right? So that being said, if a lessor is going to come along and offer me a lease rate of $110,000 for three years, but it would cost me $20 million to buy it, I'd probably lease it, right? So we treat everything as a transaction. Every transaction is. There's no blanket rule for each one. We left some questions out there, but we are out of time, Ryan. Do you have any closing comments? No, I just want to thank everyone for paying attention and taking a look at the story. Feel free to reach out to our team. They have my contact information.
Happy to talk to any of you. There's probably more hours of YouTube videos of me available on the website that I'm going to regret in my lifetime. So there's tons out there to tell the story.
I watched them, Ryan. Look great.
Well, I'm sorry you had to do that, but I appreciate it. But, you know, I think our Ks and Qs are pretty thorough. So I'd start with our MD&A, and then I'd be happy to answer any questions. And I just encourage you to build the model using unit economics and just see the power of adding aircraft to our model. Fair enough. I think it's a compelling story that we are not, I think our valuation doesn't reflect what we've done. But I'm paid to say that. So figure it out yourself, and hopefully you agree.
Thank you for the informative presentation.
And have a great day, everybody.
Thanks, John.
Thanks.