Well, good afternoon, everyone. Andrew Didora here with the BofA Airlines research team. Our next fireside is with the team here from Republic. We have the Chairman and CEO, David Grizzle, President and Incoming CEO, Matt Koscal, and CFO Joe Allman. gentlemen, thanks for joining us today.
Really glad to be here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for inviting us. That's the three of us right there. How do we look? I wanna pick up on what Andrew just talked about here. We are a company that prides itself on our culture. A lot of companies talk about culture, but for us, it is truly foundational. Andrew just mentioned that Matt has been promoted to the role of CEO effective June 15th. That's very important, and I want Matt to be the one to actually walk us through this slide here. This is not just wallpaper, but you actually hear this because our culture is foundational, and Matt is the artisan of these cultural artifacts that are presented here. Matt, would you go through that for us?
Thanks, David. Let me start though by re-emphasizing what David just said. I truly believe any CEO who doesn't have culture as their number one initiative is missing the boat today. The workforce is more demanding than ever. We've transitioned into an employee-employer relationship en masse that is more transactional in nature. If you have a transactional workforce relationship, you get the nine-to-five, and that's it. You never get the discretionary effort. You never get that discretionary connectivity to folks feeling that they own a part of the mission that they're a part of. You can't be excellent, and you definitely can't run an excellent airline if you don't have that discretionary effort. We rely on it every single day to deliver the product that we deliver in a very complicated work environment.
That is why culture is so important to everything that we do. I'll guide you to the guiding principles on this page because that truly, as we talk through it David just had an opportunity to join me and 40 of our associates on a mission trip in Honduras, something we do once a year. We take them down, we've got a sustainability mission that we've been working on down there. One of the things he came back and highlighted for me, he goes is, "Every one of your conversations, I've seen you do it in the workplace. I haven't seen you do it in our" You just hadn't been a part of it with me.
Every conversation we have with every partner and everyone that we engage with, we lean back into one of our four pillars of guiding principles, stewardship, excellence, trust, respect, care for one another, fun and action. I think that is essential because it provides that connectivity and fabric for our associates into what we're doing and connects their mission with their work and their purpose. We believe that's a competitive advantage. We're assured that it's a competitive advantage, where we look at a marketplace where human capital and access to human capital, retention of that human capital is the most competitive thing we compete in each and every day. We've made tremendous investments in our training infrastructure. David will talk about in a minute.
For us to not invest in culture in a way that allows us to get the most out of that investment and to retain those associates, is something that's a huge miss. It's not just words on a slide, but it is the number one mission that I have as CEO, that our leadership team has, is that we create a culture and a work environment that is committed to excellence, that allows our associates to connect each and every day to that mission and to be empowered to make it happen. As you'll see in the presentation as we go further, we do something that is not very easy to replicate. At the end of the day, it is because of our culture.
You'll continue to hear us harp on this idea of culture. The reason is that it is our culture that enables us to achieve industry-leading operational reliability. That is what we sell, operational reliability, especially in the most challenging airspace in America. I saw your face. We fly predominantly in the Northeast. That is where we have the worst weather, compounded by the most significant air traffic control challenges, and we are hands down the best operator in that geography. We are that good because of our culture, particularly in an irregular operation situation. It is culture more than it is technology that enables you to recover quickly from a significant irregular operation like we've had in spades during the first quarter. We rely very heavily on culture because we're selling operational excellence.
We have a leadership team that has been with this company for decades. More importantly, they have been in regional airlines. They are experienced in this geography for decades. They have learned the particular techniques that are necessary to achieve high operational reliability in very challenging work environments. You know, I've gotten a lot of calls from friends recently asking me how we're being affected at Republic Airways with the surging fuel prices. I explained to them it's had no adverse impact on us at all because we don't bear any fuel risk. In our capacity purchase agreement model, we don't bear fuel risk. In addition, we don't bear passenger marketing demand risk. Again, indirectly, it will have an impact over time. We have no direct passenger marketing risk as well.
Our CPA model insulates us from the most significant vagaries that the airline business in general has to deal with. We have made a significant number of very smart investments over time to create an infrastructure that supports our company from the first time an employee walks in the door until the time that pilot is sitting in a left seat. Starting in 2018, we identified that a pilot shortage was coming, and we immediately embarked on significant self-help activities, starting with creating a flight school that is an ab initio flight school.
People can come into our flight school, LIFT Academy, with absolutely no flight experience at all, and we work with them, providing financial support, so that they are able to emerge from there, bill hours in one of our subsidiaries or as a certified flight instructor, and move to our right seat in our airplanes. They begin enjoying another area of investment that we have made, which is to build an integrated training facility where we have our headquarters in Carmel.
The beauty of what we have done, and I really have to credit Matt with a large part of this, is that from the moment a pilot, a prospective pilot walks in the door at LIFT Academy until he or she finds themselves sitting in the left seat of one of our Embraer E170s or E175s, they have received an integrated training experience involving not only preparing them for understanding the technology we use, but again, inculturating them in what makes Republic such a special place to fly. We have found that by doing that we have been able to avoid the challenges of pilot supply shortage in a way that has not been fully mastered by some of our or other participants in the industry here. We have a strong balance sheet.
We have a very strong balance sheet, one that we have, I would call it a leverage efficiency strategy that we are also pursuing, even with the balance sheet that we have. We intend to make it stronger and to make it more serviceable, increasingly serviceable for our operation. Matt said that, or I said that Matt has been promoted to CEO. That is a change that was envisioned a year ago when our former CEO and essentially our founder departed to become the FAA administrator. At that time, we put in place a transition plan to move us from Bryan to Matt. We will fully complete that June 15th. We have the highest degree of confidence that Matt will be able to build significantly on what exists at Republic because he's been such a significant architect of it thus far.
Matt, let me tell here a little bit more about what we are. We're a single-fleet airline. We fly just E170s and E175s. We have three customers. You can see the distribution of our aircraft positioning among those three there. Again, as I said before, almost all of our operations are in the Northeast. It is because of what we do in the Northeast that these three customers in particular value us so very highly. In this slide here, you can see that we have been through a number of manifestations as an airline, and where we are now, it is a significantly more simple and consistent operation than what we've been at many times in the past.
The important thing about our history within the industry is that we have now emerged after the failures of other carriers, the consolidation of other carriers, as the one fully scaled pure-play CPA carrier with a single fleet. None of the others have that. Each of those elements is important. The fact that we are a pure-play CPA, I told you the advantage that we have for that. We have a single fleet type. We are fully scaled. With Matt, let me turn it over to Matt.
Sure. Thanks, David. You know, great background, and it really, you know, as we look at it all comes together as to why we have the relationships we have with our three large partners. Key word to focus on here is brands, right? Why? Because over the last decade, we've seen our customer strategy change to brand- loyal airlines, right? No different with our product. If you went back 15 years ago and you were selling CPA service, it was all about low cost. Who's providing the lowest cost of flight hour operations? Today, we are seeing the haves and the have-nots in the aviation industry, and our three partners here are delivering the brands that are at the top of that K curve and are really starting to show the differentiation of premium product, brand- loyal customers in premium environments.
We've had to adapt our business model over that same period of time to recognize that we have a brand ourselves. If we're going to be the solution provider for the three major carriers who are looking to deliver a differentiated brand, goes right back to this culture story. It needs to start by us delivering a differentiated premium experience to our associates and providing them differentiated tools to deliver operational excellence unlike anyone else. It's worked for us well. We have had several iterations, as David has described, but each one of those iterations had a common theme. It was being a proactive solution provider for a need from our codeshare partners. Today, it's all about brand dual-class service. When you look at our density of operation, hopefully folks in here realize you've flown us.
If you've flown out of New York City, you've flown us. I guarantee it. We're, you know, the largest airline that many people have never heard of if they're really not paying attention to the operated by signal. What does this tell you? This tells you what we do is incredibly important for our codeshare partners by the markets we fly in. It's incredibly valuable for our codeshare partners, and it is incredibly difficult to replicate. You know, the entry threat that we have by somebody coming in and trying to replicate what we do at scale is an incredibly high hurdle. You know, every day we'll hear from our associates, "Man, can't we get some easier flying?" I quickly remind them that, you know, the fact that it's not easy makes us incredibly relevant long term.
A barrier to entry we have is the operational excellence that we've been able to deliver year in and year out. As you look at this map, this shows you two things, two important notes. One is it gives you a visual of the density that we have in some of the most important markets in the country. Markets that in good times and bad times or, you know, everything in between are relevant. They're the quickest to recover, and they're least impacted even when we have slower times. What David didn't mention, which I think is a really important thing to keep front of mind in a very busy aviation market, is we almost have a counter-cyclical trend when times slow down, right? When there's a de-gauging because demand actually slows, and we're not seeing that signal even in today's marketplace.
When there's a de-gauging, what you see is our codeshare partners turn to higher utilization of our product because it fits the density and demand for the connectivity that they need to feed their hubs. Even in a, in a historic, you know, slowdown, we've actually seen this counter-cyclical trend that our demand remains either, you know, robust, flat or increasing because they de-gauge to use our aircraft even with greater frequency. What's not on here in this slide and, you know, is to recognize we do all of this, and David talked about with better excellence than anybody else out there with operational reliability. What does that mean in our world? Last year, we had a 99.99 controllable completion factor mark. If it wasn't being canceled by air traffic control or weather, we weren't canceling it.
Our operational reliability as far as maintenance reliability and crew reliability is second to none in the most difficult environments. IROPS, you know, I wanna highlight that as well. David talked about irregular operations. Realize irregular operations are becoming more regular, okay? In March alone, 24 days were irregular operational days for us. Having the tools and the resources to deliver that high level of reliability is becoming increasingly more important as we see stresses in staffing at ATC and some of the other constraints that are really impacting the industry, and we've demonstrated year in and year out robustness in delivering that. An important thing on here as well is you see this new blue spider web coming out of the Texas area, and that represents our expansion with Mesa.
What's great about that is it not only gives us scale that I'll talk about, increased scale, but it gives us our first geographic diversity in where we operate. We saw some real uplift in Q1 in regards to while the Northeast Corridor was a very difficult operating environment, the performance and the weather patterns through Houston and that part of the country gave us our first level of diversification and operational disruption, and that was a great early sign that we saw in the first full quarter of Mesa operations. As we look at this merger that we closed last November on November 25th, what's great about this merger?
Well, first, the, you know, the obvious part is it gives us increased scale, and increased scale is a wonderful thing to have in our part of the business for a whole host of reasons which I know you're aware of. What this gave us was immediate scale. You know, if you look at an organic opportunity bringing 60 aircraft on, if we had signed up this deal and just, you know, stolen share from Mesa, that's a two-year, two-and-a-half- year uplift to actually get those aircraft into the operation. Here we've got the full- year benefit of 60 aircraft in day one. You know, the transaction strategically, the way we put it together gave us an immediate uptick of 60 aircraft in the operation. It also has been an underperforming asset, you know?
We're already seeing early signs of us improving the maintenance turn times, applying our expertise, our planning, our supply chain management. That gives us, you know, increased confidence that as we get through this integration over the next two years, we will see improved built-in growth out of improving the performance and utilization of the Mesa asset. Great opportunities there for us to actually take an underperforming asset and bring it up to our level operational excellence to the benefit of our shareholders and our customers. Finally, it's great for our employees, right? It gives them additional basing opportunities, additional growth, additional codeshare opportunities to fly on. A great strategic transaction for us that worked for our codeshare partners.
It, it fixed an underperforming asset for one of our codeshare partners and provided us with growth and scale, and we're really pleased with where we sit today with the Mesa integration. We're ahead of pace as we look at the Mesa integration roadmap. It's really a one, two , three kind of phased process here. Phase 1 is corporate integration in the back office work streams. We're ahead of our initial internal plan and expect that to be completed in Q4 of this year. Phase 2 is our fleet harmonization, bringing these 60 aircraft onto our maintenance program. When we get through that process, we are on target with each one of the milestones that we've established, which were aggressive for us. They really were aggressive targets, but we've been hitting those through Q1.
As we get through that process, that will unlock additional utilization opportunity in that fleet as we bring it to our maintenance program, our level of maintenance care, which is a great long-term 2027, 2028 opportunity for us. The last piece is this regulatory integration, bringing the two operational certificates into harmonization. That's a multi-year process that'll take us through 2027 into 2028. There's typically five revision cycles that we go through in bringing the two ops specs together. We're filing the first revision cycle this month with the FAA. It's focused on bringing our safety management systems into harmonization and unifying those programs. We're on track to deliver a unified operation over the next two years.
All of that is encompassed obviously by IT systems integration and building up, which we've done in the last six months, really building the hardware infrastructure at Mesa to allow our systems and processes to come in and be supported there. We've already seen improvements in operational reliability within that operation on the installed fleet, and we'll continue to envelope this entire process over the next two and a half years as we bring the two organizations together. It really just brings us back to our competitive advantage. I know it sounds like a, you know, a broken record, but it starts with culture. You know, we have the right ingredients because we have the right culture. You know, we marry that with we've got the right fleet, the E175 fleet.
If any of you are flying regional aircraft on a regular basis, it's the aircraft you want to be on. You've got overhead bins, you've got two-by-two seating, you've got first class cabins. I mean, it is a wonderful product to fly on, and it's built for, you know, the business and leisure customer alike. We've got the right infrastructure in place. You know, we have made the right investments over the last several years, from training infrastructure to ab initio training solutions to our IT solutions to be positioned to be the right solution provider for our customer needs today and into the future. That's really what will differentiate us as we continue to move forward, was we built a reputation of being the solution provider for our customers, American Delta and United, in their most complicated areas of operation.
We've made the right investments to position ourselves for that into the future. With that, I'll let Joe briefly take you through some financials, and then we'll open it up to some Q&A.
Great. Thanks, Matt. I'll just touch on a few highlights from the first quarter, but as Matt and David have already covered, it was an extremely challenging operational environment. Our completion factor, inclusive of ATC cancellations and weather, was down about 3% from what would be a normal first quarter, around 97%. We actually were below 94% at 93.87%. That's nearly about five days worth of flying that we lost entirely in the first quarter. But with that, the business still performed quite strong and was very resilient. We had an adjusted EBITDAR of approximately $100 million, had about $9 million of add- back related to merger- and integration- related costs to get to that number.
Our revenues as we sit here during the quarter were up 34% on increased block hour activity, which is what we measure as kind of the flight and block hour produced for our airline partners and how we get compensated from them. The balance sheet, as David is extremely well positioned. We've made all the critical investments necessary for not just 2026 and 2027, but really for the next decade and a half. I mean, that truly is what I think any new investor coming into Republic should understand. The, the capital infrastructure and training infrastructure investments that we've made over the last five years are just transformative, and we believe will set the airline up extremely well for the future. As we look at the year this year, we see gross CapEx of about $170 million.
Much of that has already taken place in Q1. We'll see CapEx over the balance of the year kind of lighten up as we've concluded all of our recent new aircraft deliveries that were coming in to replace E170s at United with new E175 aircraft. The balance sheet continues to strengthen with a de-leveraging effort. We see long-term goal of leverage targets below or at 1.5x . Today, we sit just at 2.7x in terms of turns, and by the end of the year, we should be below 2.2x. We are well positioned for the future, and I wanna leave time for questions. Our last slide was just reaffirming the guidance that we issued at the end of our year-end call in Q1.
Obviously, given the performance of the airline in any other environment, we probably would have been looking at or talking about raising guidance, given the performance of the business in the first quarter. With the volatility that we have in the markets, and in particular, just where we see the business shaping up, we're not seeing anything negative in terms of those trends. They're all positive. As we sit here, we just felt like it was so recent from our year-end call to the first quarter call, we just reaffirmed guidance. Hopefully, we can provide you an update as we move into quarter. With that—
Great.
Conclude. Sorry, Andrew, we left eight minutes.
No, all good. Great, great overview and great intro to the company. I know you guys are probably a little bit new to some of the folks in the audience, so if there are any people have any questions, just let me know. I'd love, like, your culture point is, you know, certainly taken. Maybe two questions on that. One, just in terms of Mesa, I would have, you know, I would think the culture at Mesa was a lot different than what you have at Republic now. Like, how did you go about, like, trying to affect change in that or, you know, cultural change in that organization? Then second, you know, you spoke about your culture driving your, you know, great, you know, performance in the Northeast. Like, what's your secret sauce here?
You think we're gonna tell you?
There are some pilots here that would like to know, I think.
Look, on the culture side at Mesa, first and foremost, let's go back to the type of folks that stay in aviation. You stay in aviation because you have a passion for it. It's a difficult business, right? Every day you wake up and you don't know where you're gonna be as far as we talked about IROPS. You, you think you're gonna end up in Buffalo, and you end up in Columbus overnight, right? You have to love this business. Mesa's frontline employees absolutely love this business. It's been a, it's been an easy roadmap for us to follow because it's where we were a decade and a half ago, right? We were under-invested in our technology and our infrastructure.
Coming in and taking a passionate group of aviation professionals and saying, "Hey, we're ready to invest in your airline, and here's the roadmap," has been probably one of the easiest work tasks you could have as a leader. They've been hungry for the help, hungry for the investment, and really responsive. Like anything, you make immediate changes. We made some changes. You know, where if we identified any roadblocks early on to culture, we made those changes. We've been on the ground and, you know, visible and present each and every day and week in Mesa and Phoenix since the closing date on November 25th. It's not a secret recipe. It's just genuine presence and investment and being there with the team.
I do wanna say one thing about your final question about, you know, where does culture fit into i rregular operations and managing those. We have an every morning ops call where we go through every event that occurred the preceding day. I sit in on that call probably once a week. I've seen there what I call competitive collaboration, which I have never seen in any other environment, where the ops people are genuinely at one time competing with one another to do their job the very best, and they recognize and exhibit that doing the very best can only be done collaboratively. You have these two principles at work that are generally thought of as antithetical, but they come together because of the culture that has been developed here in a way that drives excellent performance in the irregular operations. Competitive collaboration.
Doesn't help me on my Northeast question, though. Nice list of questions here. With five minutes left, I kinda wanna just focus on maybe your core customer just being the network carriers, right? I guess when you speak to your partners today, you know, what do you think they value the most out of, you know, out of Republic? Is it, you know, your staffing stability, cost structure? Why do they choose you over internal operation, you know, their own, you know, their own affiliates or other regional carriers?
Yeah. Look, it's a great and fair question. Cost is absolutely important, right? You know, cost, though, is, you know, the entry fee. You gotta be cost competitive at what you do. What do we do that's differentiated? One, you know, we perform with excellence. We do it with very little intervention, right? I mean, wow, it is wonderful to have. We all have partners, right? That are high maintenance and low maintenance. We are a low- maintenance partner because we're proactive. We've made investments. We're industry leading in what we've done. We are proactively collaborative with each one of our codeshare partners. Meaning when we identify trends, we bring those trends to their attention. We come up with, you know, collaborative approaches to actually tackle that and help them deliver a better product in their regional space.
It really is just the operational excellence each and every day that we're able to produce and the proactive nature to solving problems and helping them take that and, you know, make their other partners better. You know, we want this to be a strong industry.
You know, there's nothing that we do that we try and, like, keep from others. You know, the stronger this industry is, the better for everyone. We've got a lot of confidence that, you know, we've got such a head start that we can continue to outperform our peers as they try to catch up on the infrastructure and technology and cultural investments.
Got it. A theme that has popped up among the network carriers of late is just potential consolidation, right? When we think about network carrier consolidation, how do you think that impacts the regional industry?
Yeah. Look, I'm gonna stick to talking about our consolidation with Mesa.
Sure.
I'll let our codeshare partners talk about what they think about their level of consolidation. Other than to say, we've seen everything as an industry over the last 20 years.
Have you seen a lot of consolidation?
Yeah, we've seen a lot of consolidation. We've seen it in the regional space. You've seen it in the mainline space. I think at the end of the day, as long as we stick to our core values as far as being able to provide them solutions in the most complicated environments, no matter what that is, we're gonna continue to be, you know, their partner choice that they look to. We really value ourselves that in their most complicated and difficult times, New York is a complicated and difficult time every day.
Yeah.
They've leaned into us to solve that problem for them. It hasn't always been the case. They've brought other folks in to New York, and they've moved them out and reduced their, you know, frequency and density there. You know, we'll let them figure out what's the right footprint for their long-term strategy. I know that the value proposition we bring to them is, you know, enduring long term.
Got it. Just maybe last one for me in the final couple of minutes that we have is just, you know, when you think about, you know, when you speak to your partners, kind of when you think about your balance sheet, right? Just in terms of, you know, matching up my kind of debt profiles, how do you think about the long-term margin potential of the business?
Yeah. I'll tell you, I think right now our focus is on, you know, continuing to evaluate ways to de-lever. The business is extremely well positioned going forward. We believe as we continue to progress through the Mesa integration, we will see some uplift in the margin. You know, this business is quite stable, though. That's the one thing as an investor you should understand. The regional business doesn't have really high highs, and it really shouldn't have really low lows. I don't wanna call us a utility, but at some level it has that utility type concept where, you know, we focus on the cash flow generation and, obviously how that cash gets redeployed across the balance sheet, whether it's reinvested through CapEx, you know, taking down leverage through debt pay- downs or shareholder-friendly activities.
Got it. Any final questions from the audience in the last few seconds that we have? No? Thank you, gentlemen.
Thank you.